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Accepted
David Cummings
Asked: 2017-02-23 06:31:32 +0800 CST

Nagios to count files in certain Directory

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I am trying to monitor a directory on a server in which the amount of files can vary from day to day. This server itself is monitored fine on Nagios3. However, if I want to count the number of files within a directory, for instance d:\david\ , which are all XML files.

Can nagios do this, and if so how would I do it? I am newish to Nagios and still finding my feet with it.

monitoring nagios windows-server-2012

2 Answers

  1. You need to write a script in any language you know/prefer to count the number of files in your directory. In this script, you can return specific exit status based on whether you want to consider the current state as OK, WARNING, or CRITICAL in nagios terms.

    Then, you can use some tool like NSClient++ or Winrpe to call your script from nagios.

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  2. Best Answer

    You can use the nrpe daemon (on the nagios server) to initiate a command on the remote host. In your Nagios services.cfg you might add a stanza which looks like this (change the admins contact group to a real contact group on your system.. or leave commented out?):

    define service {
    service_description       count files in directory d:\david\
    check_command             count_david_files!
    host_name                 my.windows.host
    check_period              24x7
    notification_period       24x7
    # contact_groups            +admins
    event_handler_enabled     0
    use                       generic-service
}

    Then, on my.windows.host you would have to find the nrpe.cfg file and add a line something like this (note: this is from a linux client but the configuration for windows is very similar)

    command[count_david_files]=/usr/local/nagios/myplugins/check_david_files

    The file check_david_files would need to be some kind of executable (batch file works apparently) which prints either "OK', "WARNING", "CRITICAL" or "UNKNOWN" and then exits with the corresponding exit code:

     OK (0), WARNING (1), CRITCAL (2) and UNKNOWN (3).

    It is these exit coes which trigger the alert state in nagios to signal to the server somehting is amiss. It is in this batch file where you could do something like:

    @echo "OK: Files less than 10"
@exit 0

    or for a warning:

    @echo "WARNING: Files > than 10!"
@exit 1

    To start out with, you may want to use only those two lines for testing your setup. Good luck.

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