[Nagiosplug-devel] regarding RRD, MRTG, xpdfile_update_service_performance_data

[Radu Duta]

I have a question regarding the operation of xpdfile_update_service_performance_data.
Is there any specific reason that the file is not opened and closed for each write?  

I wanted to use --with-file-perfdata to log, and have a process load the data from
the file every say 10 minutes, and then roll/delete the file.  If the file is never closed
than it is impossible to roll the file without restarting nagios.  

As a matter of principle I prefer not to restart the nagios process just to roll logs.

I don't think it's for performance, especially considering that checks are done by forks and 
adding one more 2-3 more function calls should be pretty modest.

Maybe I'm approaching the problem the wrong way.  I basically want to save the extra PING
data such as latency and packet loss into a RRD database.  I looked at the typical options and
it seemed like --with-file-perfdata was the best;  then I discovered the file is never closed
and all my hopes were dashed for doing anything real-time short of some fancy tail logger.

Is there a better way?  maybe this should be part of the plugin? after all RTT and loss are
specific to that one plugin.  Though now that I think about it RTT is really a function of
every network plugin, just not may of them take advantage of it.


I settled on having MRTG query nagios/var/status.log since that was by far the easiest to
integrate; but it's not the most elegant of solutions.

any ideas/suggestions?

anybody working on adding RRD support to nagios?  seems like a pretty useful data to have
and keep since it can directly pinpoint networking/systems problems.


-- 
Radu Duta  <rduta at syskey.com>