plugins « Nagios Labs

Nagios XI is extremely flexible, perhaps more flexible than most people realize!

To showcase the flexibility of Nagios XI, President and Founder of Nagios – Ethan Galstad, has developed the plugin Doomsday Check to monitor an arbitrary doomsday date (of your choosing) with customizable warning and critical thresholds.

Although this plugin may not be very practical in a networking environment, it’s fun to play around with and is definitely worth a try.

Service Status Detail

If you would like to use this plugin, simply download it here to your plugins directory (/usr/local/nagios/libexec/), make it executable (`chmod +x check_doomsday.php`), and create a service for it.

You can find more information on how to manage plugins in Nagios XI in this document. If you are an XI customer you may also watch this video.

If you are new to Nagios XI, you can test drive it free for 60 Days by downloading the trial.

Also, the Nagios World Conference is fast approaching! Register here today!

As cloud services grow in popularity, so do the networks that provide those cloud services. Few webserver-based distributed databases are as easy to install and configure as Apache Cassandra. Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassandra offers robust support for clusters spanning multiple data centers, with asynchronous master-less replication allowing low latency operations for all clients.

Cassandra relies on the Java platform, and as those of you who have tried to configure Java app monitoring most likely know, the experience can be painful. There are a handful of plugins on the Nagios Exchange that attempt to simplify the configuration. As these plugins rely on the Apache Cassandra utility “nodetool”, you either need to install Cassandra on the Nagios server (which is not suggested) or use an agent (like NRPE) to run the plugin script directly from the Cassandra server (which should have the nodetool utility).

The Cluster Node Check is designed to verify whether the number of live nodes is less than a specified number, and if so trigger a warning or critical alert within Nagios.

Continue reading ‘Monitoring Apache Cassandra Database Nodes with Nagios XI’