[Nagiosplug-devel] RFC: Nagios 3 and Embedded Perl Plugins

[Andreas Ericsson]

Stéphane Urbanovski wrote:
> Andreas Ericsson a écrit :
> 
>> Supporting system load, memory usage and disk usage is, again, a 
>> different kind of worms. There's no standardized interface usable to 
>> obtain these metrics that reliably work on the set of systems supported 
>> by the current plugin-distribution. As such, it would be maintenance 
>> nightmare to try to keep it working on all those systems. For reference, 
>> download the GNU coreutils package and count the #ifdef lines. Not pretty.
> 
> Of course this "newnrpe" is be able to use traditionnal plugins if there is no internal support.
> 

Assuming "newnrpe" would be running on a remote host, it would almost 
always just be used to check local things (disk usage, uptime, memory 
usage, process info etc, etc). As those checks are very difficult to 
make portable, I frankly don't see the value for it.

The network checks would be easy (although time-consuming) to slot in, 
but they wouldn't be used very much over nrpe.

>>> and support permanent connection to Nagios (over Unix or TCP sockect)
>> This would require a lot of hacking in Nagios to solve.
>>
>>
>>> - make Nagios support directly this new "super" nrpe as dl module
>>>
>>> Security and memory management problems should be easier to fix,
>>> or at least have a lower impact if limited to nrpe.
>>>
>> But you just said to load this newfangled dream-version of nrpe as a 
>> module? That sort of microsoft'ish thinking leads to "integrated" and 
>> very unstable code I'm afraid.
> 
> (Ok, my english is really poor ...)
> 
> Not the "newnrpe", wich is a separate process, but only the communication with newnrpe part
> 

Ah, I see what you mean now. I'm afraid that fairly drastically reduces 
the scalability of Nagios. Assume for a second that you have 1500 hosts 
to monitor, all of which use NRPE for checking local stuff. Keeping up 
the connection with those 1500 hosts requires 1500 open file-descriptors 
at all times. Most systems can have a lot more files than that open per 
process at any given time, but there is still a hard limit lurking 
somewhere which means Nagios can no longer check an arbitrary number of 
hosts and services. The worst part is that that hard limit will be set 
differently on different systems.

I'm afraid you'll find that this just isn't useful enough to warrant the 
massive developer effort it would take to write it and seeing as you're 
the only one arguing your case, you'd have to write it yourself to get 
it implemented. Either way, further discussion is fairly pointless until 
you have some code available.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231