Yum, Nagios gluttony!
I’m donating Nagios monitoring to a couple of nonprofits, and this brings up how Nagios configurations grow. In short, you learn over time what you need to keep an eye on.
For example: On one nonprofit, someone forgot to renew the domain (oops!). It just so happens that there’s a plugin for that. Godaddy outage hoses DNS? Add a check for that. SSL cert expires (oops!)? Add a check for that. The web site returns 200 OK (thereby showing up as okay in Nagios) but no content appears? Add a check for that.
And then apply all those checks to your other hosts. So the same thing doesn’t happen to them.
And this is how you end up with so many checks.
define command {
command_name check_content
command_line $USER1$/check_http -r “</body>” -H $HOSTADDRESS
}define command {
command_name DNS_resolving
command_line $USER1$/check_dns -H $HOSTADDRESS
}define command {
command_name check_domain
command_line $USER1$/check_domain -d $HOSTADDRESS
}define command {
command_name check_cert
command_line $USER1$/check_http -ssl -C 14 -H ‘$HOSTADDRESS’
}
Yes, I added checks on Thanksgiving. *facepalm*
