Koboli, an email interaction gateway for Nagios/Icinga

If you’ve followed my projects previously, you know that while I love Nagios, and its stepbrother Icinga, it’s often a nuisance and the butt of lots of jokes (see: Jordan Sissel’s PuppetConf 2012 talk on Logstash). A big part of my work over the last several months has focused on how to make interacting with it more productive. Nagios is totally happy to blast you with alerts, but doesn’t give you a way to, say, turn them off on some false positive when you’re on vacation in the middle of the mountains, miles away from Internet service reliable enough to … Continue Reading →

Monitoring Windows MPIO through Nagios

Sometimes, we need to do SAN maintenance — firmware upgrades, disruptive fabric changes, and the like. When these situations come up, it’s useful to know if anything is in a condition where it will break if it loses its connection to SAN storage, especially if you’re a lowly storage administrator without admin access to any of the Windows systems connected up to the SAN. I poked around, and could not find one single utility or tool for monitoring the Windows MPIO framework, so I whipped up a quick script using VBScript and WMI. The script is called like so: cscript.exe … Continue Reading →

Charting performance data for IBM Midrange Storage Series SANs with PNP4Nagios

If you’ve used IBM SAN products, particularly the DS4000, DS5000 and DS6000 series (which are rebranded LSI), one of the most obnoxious things about it is how you’re pretty much forced to roll your own monitoring tools. Compared to many mainstream vendors (and Sun/Oracle in particular), IBM’s performance monitoring and modelling tools have been lackluster at best and completely unsupplied at worst. The best tool you’ve got is the SMcli, which doesn’t supply a ton of good information, but at least provides you with a starting point for capacity planning. I had originally wanted to make something like this for … Continue Reading →

Nagios plugin: check_sa.pl

There’s a lot of useful Nagios addons out there. One of them, pnp4nagios, allows you to create graphs of all of your Nagios performance data with zero configuration. This is pretty nice, because your monitoring configurations are kept in one place, rather than having to separately maintain configurations for Nagios and Cacti (or whatever you use). I’ve always wanted to be able to monitor things like number of open sockets, page faults, context switches, and other performance counters. Some of them are available through SNMP; others aren’t. The ones that are available aren’t all available by device. I wanted a … Continue Reading →