Home / server / Questions / 395003
In Process
jrg
Asked: 2012-06-03 10:55:56 +0800 CST

How do I monitor a remote server with nagios?

  • 772

I have a remote Ubuntu system, and I need to do the following checks on it in nagios:

  • check_users

  • check_procs

  • check_all_disks.

How do I do that on a remote system? I've looked around, but everything I've found seems to be from either early 2010 or ealier.

nagios

2 Answers

  1. Just because it's from 2 years ago doesn't make it irrelevant. Nagios is a stable, robust system, and as such plenty of useful information is that old.

    The tool you want is NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor); it allows you to run Nagios plugins on a remote machine over the network, and collect the results in your local Nagios server. There's bucketloads of introductory documentation available, so I won't bother going into a detailed HOWTO here.

    • 9

  2. Another option is too install these checks on the server that is to be monitored. Then create a user that on that server for these checks and setup ssh keys. You can then wrap these checks inside check_by_ssh. What happens then is Nagios user will ssh into the monitored server, execute the command, and the log out.

    For example, the nagios command configuration would look something like:

    define command{
        command_name check_procs
        command_line $USER1$/check_by_ssh -t $_HOSTPARAM_SSH_TIMEOUT$ -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -C "$USER1$/check_procs $ARG1$"
}

    One downside to keep in mind is that ssh has more overhead than other options. However this not really a problem for smaller environments monitoring servers that are not too tight on resources.

    • 3