Installing NRPE on a large number of RHEL servers

[genna]

Hi,
We are planning to implement Nagios XI in our environment which has large number ( hundreds) of RHEL 6/7 servers. I'm looking at the best way of rolling out NRPE agent. It appears that a pre-built version is fairly old - v2.15. The v3.2 that most doco covers needs to be built.
My questions are:
Are there any plans to release a more recent pre-built version?
If I have to build it, do I need to do it on every host ( which sounds a very inefficient) or can I build once and distribute it. I don't seem to be be able to find instructions how to do so. ?

[scottwilkerson]

Hi,
We are planning to implement Nagios XI in our environment which has large number ( hundreds) of RHEL 6/7 servers. I'm looking at the best way of rolling out NRPE agent. It appears that a pre-built version is fairly old - v2.15. The v3.2 that most doco covers needs to be built.
My questions are:
Are there any plans to release a more recent pre-built version?
If I have to build it, do I need to do it on every host ( which sounds a very inefficient) or can I build once and distribute it. I don't seem to be be able to find instructions how to do so. ?

We will be adding it to our package, but can't currently state the timeline. However this package does still compile on the sever.

You could build it on each host version (6/7) however you would need to create a whole installer that builds the services, places all the files/plugins in the correct directory, etc.

[mcapra]

You could build it on each host version (6/7) however you would need to create a whole installer that builds the services, places all the files/plugins in the correct directory, etc.

Chef, Ansible, or Puppet might be useful to this end.

Here's a cookbook for Chef that looks ready to go for NRPE:
https://github.com/sous-chefs/nrpe

[dwhitfield]

Ansible

Considering this is XI, ansible might be the easiest, since Red Hat bought Ansible Inc.

Salt and CFEngine are also popular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso ... t_software

[gormank]

I created a puppet module to install nrpe using the fullinstall script so now when a new host is created, all I have to do is add the host in NXI, and add it to a hostgroup or two and monitoring is done.
I won't say it was easy, since it was my first module, we're behind a proxy, use Satellite, and finally, doing the install via the script, it wants to run sequentially, which is not what puppet likes.
I had to make various parts get done via puppet and trick the script into thinking it had done them by creating the some of the inslalled* files. For example, I didn't want the repos set up so I had puppet create the installed.repos file.

[tmcdonald]

The recommendations for Ansible, Puppet, Salt, Chef, etc. are pretty standard in the IT field for any question of "How do I do X across a lot of servers?"