Multiple agents (NCPA+NRPE1.9) configuration

[Pablogc]

Hello.

Due to the special needs of the projects we're working on, we need to maintain a mixture of hosts with NRPE (1.9) and NCPA agents in our monitored environment.

The custom plugins we've developed for our performance indicators are almost the same in all of them, but the problem comes when we have to maintain different configurations for each of the agents.

Let's say that we want to be able to change warning thresholds once and make the changes effective for all of the agents (this kind of changes are terribly frequent in our case).

Additionally we'll need to dinamically maintain nrpe.cfg as nrpe1.9 doesn't support plugin parametrization from server (afaik). We have some simple workaround with an auxiliar plugin that syncs configs (and plugins), but maybe it's far from an optimal solution.

Am I missing any kind of smart solution to get rid about this?

Thank you very much for your kind attention.

[lmiltchev]

Let's say that we want to be able to change warning thresholds once and make the changes effective for all of the agents (this kind of changes are terribly frequent in our case).

Can you show us an example of how the thresholds are currently defined? Are you passing the arguments to the "check_nrpe" command, or these are "hardcoded" on the client? Where are you changing the thresholds, on the server or on the client (when using NRPE)? With NCPA, are you using active or passive checks? Can you show us an example config?

[Pablogc]

The thresholds are defined as parameters to our plugin scripts:

Code: Select all

check_ipcs_capacity -W 80 -C 90

They're passed to NCPA as parameters from server (standard NagiosXI configuration) with no problem, but NRPE1.9 doesn't allow usage of parameters (AFAIK), that's why it needs all parameters to be hardcoded in the client.

Our best idea at this point is to develop a synchronization script that:

• geneates a valid nrpe.cfg by parsing NCPA configuration
• sends it to all clients

[ssax]

That's correct, NRPE 2.0 was the first version to allow arguments.

You're right, scripting it out is the only way you can do it at this point.

[Pablogc]

Thank you.

Once taken into account that we'll have to develop this solution...
Do you think such a piece of software could be interesting for the community?

Are this kind of heterogeneous environments common in the real world or is ours a pathological case?

BR.

[lmiltchev]

Do you think such a piece of software could be interesting for the community?

It is hard to say if this type of solution would be interesting for the community. I haven't seen many customers using such an old NRPE agent. Most of users work with NRPE 2.15. NRPE 3.0 is already out...
https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/A ... or/details

Are this kind of heterogeneous environments common in the real world or is ours a pathological case?

Heterogeneous environments are not uncommon, and no, you are not a "pathological case".

Is there a reason why you are not upgrading the NRPE agent to let's say version 2.15?

[Pablogc]

That's because we are installing the agents in old production hosts with SunOS 5.10.

1.9 was the only nrpe version we managed to get working there without requiring a library upgrade we were not allowed to perform.

[mcapra]

Definitely let us know if there's any updates to this solution. Even if it's a fairly fringe case, there's a very good chance someone else will find it useful.