Nagios, Chef, AWS, Github

[agenerette]

Hello,

I recently inherited sysadmin duties for an organization who has their stuff running on 5 AWS instances: two of the VMs are on Amazon Linux, version 2013.09 (the latest, I believe), three on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I'm catching heck trying to get these hosts setup with Nagios&NRPE, such that the setup is reflected in the company's Chef org. There's already Nagios setup information on the target hosts. Only basic things like ssh and http availability are being monitored, though. This setup information is not reflected, though, in the Chef org. In other words, chef-repo/sitecookbooks/nagios is empty. Other aspects of the hosts' setup has been incorporated into Chef.

My concern, at this point, is that I don't want to set up roles, recipes, etc. related to Nagios and NRPE, apply these to the hosts, and overwrite and/or undo something that's currently working just fine (the ssh and http availability, in other words.

I've contacted the Support folks at opscode.com This from one of their techs:

"Nagios is an extremely complicated cookbook... I would recommend working on it in a completely separate testing environment. Many people have isolated chef-repo directories that may have duplicated cookbooks. The point of that is to get the full set of cookbooks necessary and not have to depend on the cookbooks being found in other locations."

A lot of what he wrote doesn't make sense to me. I'm not sure how to proceed, so I thought I'd post a note, here, in the Nagios Support Forum, to see if I could glean some information from anyone out there who's been in a similar situation and managed to get through it.

-Anthony

[sreinhardt]

I'm sure there are some great community members who have done this as well, however offhand I have not personally used chef with nagios. Would it be possible to post more or all of your conversation with them to see what additional information he provided?

[agenerette]

Let me go through my email and pull something together.

[slansing]

Awesome, we'll await that.

[eloyd]

Chef is, indeed, a very complex thing to use to manage Nagios. However, when done right, it's also a basically "set and forget" thing. Are you still in need of assistance with this? My company might be able to help.