Nagios

New and Improved check_mem.pl Nagios Plugin

Posted Fri, 06/05/2009 - 08:39 by Justin Ellison

We have always monitored RAM usage on all of boxes. Sure, there's the argument that unused RAM is money wasted, but I always like to know not just when the box is swapping, but when it's about to start swapping. There have been a few plugins over the years that I've used for this - check_ram for Solaris, check_mem for Linux, and there's also check_mem.pl. Well, migrating to Solaris 10 and ZFS started tripping the check_ram thresholds due to the ZFS ARC cache. So, I attempted to pull together a cross platform Nagios plugin that did it's best to give me what I wanted, and what do you know, it works! This graph shows the ZFS ARC cache at it's best:
cacti.png

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Nagios check_dell_warranty Plugin Updated

Posted Thu, 05/28/2009 - 15:27 by Justin Ellison

It's been blogged about recently how cool the check_dell_warranty plugin by Erinn Looney-Triggs is. It solves a very real problem for us - sometimes servers run so well you forget to make sure that you renew your support contracts. However, it wasn't quite right for us - we have some older Dells that have RHEL 4 with an older (incompatible) python on them still. Also, the plugin wouldn't work without configuring sudo. Well, like any other sysadmin would do, I fixed it!

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The Nagios Fork: Did Two Wrongs Make a Right???

Posted Tue, 05/12/2009 - 22:06 by Justin Ellison

It's an item that I feel hasn't got much press, at least in the limited RSS entries I've had time to scan lately: Nagios has been forked. I've been using Nagios long enough that I actually used NetSaint for a bit, so I have some mixed feelings about Icinga. In general, I'm all for forks when they are indeed needed - FOSWiki is a great example. But forks shouldn't be taken lightly, in many ways they are like a divorce - they should be a last resort, not a quick way out. Personally, I think that the fork will ultimately either fail or merge back into Nagios, but read on for why I think the Icinga fork is a case of two wrongs making a right.

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Installing NRPE 2.12 from source as a SMF managed service in Solaris 10

Posted Thu, 05/07/2009 - 07:22 by Justin Ellison

Installing NRPE on Solaris 10 involves just a bit more than your normal './configure && make && make install' routine. However, all the dependencies are likely present on a freshly installed system, you just have to tell NRPE where to find it. There's one file you need to patch, and then it will install. From there it's easy to plug into SMF!

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Compiling Nagios Plugins and NRPE on Solaris 10 with Sun Studio

Posted Fri, 07/06/2007 - 09:56 by Justin Ellison

We have some Sun T1000's running Solaris 10 that we are going to deploy as web servers. By compiling Apache from source using the Sun Studio compilers, you get a huge boost in performance because of the compiler's built-in optimizations for the Niagra processor.

Before deploying them, I needed to get NRPE setup, which requires that the Nagios plugins be installed. Once setup on the client side, I can point our Nagios server at the webserver and get notified of hardware issues, disk usage, load averages and what not.

Installing NRPE and the plugins using gcc is a no brainer. I thought using Sun Studio wouldn't be too much harder, but after 5 hours of banging my head against the wall, I figured out how to make them compile...

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