Dynamic Indexes

[michaewlewis]

I'm trying to set up a device that says it uses dynamic indexes for some values, and apparently Zabbix can do that with discovery rules.
(see: https://www.racom.eu/eng/products/m/rip ... ripex.html)
Is that possible in Nagios?

[jmichaelson]

I read through the document that you linked to, and I'm a bit curious about it. I'm confused about how the dynamic indexes work. Are they continuously dynamic or once set for a given piece of data for a device are they fixed?

[sgardil]

Hey @michaewlewis

I'm not certain but it may depend on what values are being dynamically indexed. I haven't monitored anything with dynamic indexing before but here is a post about dynamic IP's and potential solutions to monitor it. It sounds like using freshness checks might be the way to go if this is possible but I'm not sure what all the steps would be if the dynamic indexing values are other than ip address's. Let us know if this helps.

[michaewlewis]

Every time the device reboots, it populates the table in a first-come-first-serve basis. So, Radio5 might take index 8 and Radio10 might take index 3 based on what order things start talking after a reboot.

[michaewlewis]

I don't have any examples of this radio with a fully populated table of remote devices, since we are in the beginning stages of switching vendors. But our old radios did the same thing with the dynamic indexes. I never figured out how to handle the dynamic indexes of the old radios, either, but found another way to capture at least some of the data I was interested in.

Dynamic Indexes.jpg

What I experienced before, is that when I tried getting, for example, RSSI data in index 0, it would give me data for radio 18, and then I would reboot the master radio and it would change to data for radio 44, or whatever talked first.

[sgardil]

Ah thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately after doing some research I don't believe we have anything that can monitor this inherently. Since this seems like something that would need to be modified based on a user basis on what they are monitoring, I don't believe we have anything on the docket for upcoming features for this. If you wanted to get into it, it may be possible to make a custom plugin to monitor this in the way you want. I will add a link to some plugin docs and our changelog for if you wanted to keep up to date on our new features.

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ugins.html
https://www.nagios.com/changelog/

[michaewlewis]

Thanks.... I took a break from Nagios for a year to try solarwinds because I kept having to get too deep into nagios to do useful stuff and solarwinds looked simpler. Well it is simpler... but not as customizable and it kept breaking my radio network. So I'm back....
I think I'll look into paying nagios to write the plugins for me. I haven't evenfigured out how to import and use a plugin, much less write one.
Is doing simple math in a query still not an option? eg. voltage returns as 1198 and needs the decimal shifted to show 119.8

[sgardil]

We are glad to have you back. Yeah that is the double edge sword of Nagios. Nagios prides itself for being extremely customizable however this also makes it a bit more complicated than some of the other solutions. That being said if you have the know how and its possible to do so you can pretty much configure your nagios monitor whatever you want. Doing math in a query is definitely a thing, its more of setting something up for what specifically you want.

[cnorell]

Here are our guidelines for writing plugins: https://nagios-plugins.org/doc/guidelines.html

In short, a plugin can be written in any fashion you'd like - in any language you'd like - so long as you can run it and it outputs the correct data to STDOUT.