[TriLUG] demoing F/OSS innovation(s)

[Aaron S. Joyner]

craig at cookitservices.com wrote:

>Not sure if this is true, but I heard BB agents report happily to the Nagios server.  If that is true, then the resources of deadcat.net would be available for Nagios as well.
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BigBrother's notification scripts have various forms of returning data 
back to the core BB process.  Some of the scripts from deadcat call the 
bbnet process to send reports back over tcp.  Most simply provide output 
on the STDOUT indicating the current BB "color", which also prevents 
them from being used by Nagios.  The correct method (I think for both, 
although it's rarely followed for BB) is to exit with an appropriate 
return value -- 0 for happiness, 1 for a warning, 2 for a critical 
state, 3 for a failure to be able to monitor the service (i.e. config 
error, bad arguments, some other unknown failure).  I'm pretty sure 
that's the standard for BB, and I know it's the only thing Nagios will 
use to determine the results of a plugin.

>Does Nagios have a trending module similar to LARRD?  I saw event trending, but not data eg. CPU load, disk graphs, memory usage, etc.
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Nagios will do event trending, as you described, with a simplistic graph 
of status states over time, and it has the concept of "performance data" 
which is more particular data in a format designed to be passed off to 
something like RRDtool.  As with BigBrother it's not built-in, but there 
are easy and convenient hooks for it.  I have yet to personally 
implement this aspect, but will be glad to provide more information as I 
get a chance to tinker with it.

>Is Nagios capable to send and receive SNMP?
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Yes, it can do SNMP monitoring as part of the default plugin package (no 
monitoring at all is built into Nagios proper, but there is a 
Nagios-plugins distribution that contains all of the monitoring tools).

>BB has a very strong support group/mailing list.  I can't comment on Nagios since I have never used it before.  
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Nagios's documentation and layout is sufficient that I haven't really 
gone looking for peer support yet.  :)  So I can't really comment on it.

>Think I have something to play with the next few weeks ;-)
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I would certainly recommend it.  :)

>For completeness, I have heard positive things about Big Sister, but have not used that either.
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Yeah, double that.  I've heard good things about Big Sister being a 
free, faster, compatible implementation of BigBrother, but in my mind in 
order to be compatible it had to keep the same config-file formats, 
which is a large part of why I wanted to get away from BB.  :)  Thus, I 
have no practical experience with it either.

Aaron S. Joyner