Passive checks are extremely useful for integrating information from external applications and agents. They’re also the primary method of monitoring remote machines that are behind firewalls, proxies, and on private networks.
In an effort to simplify the setup of new remote agents and applications with Nagios XI, we developed a method for easily capturing and configuring new passive host and service check results.
Read How To Do it: Monitoring Unconfigured Objects With XI.pdf
We came across an issue about a month ago where a user was losing data with a distributed/passive checks setup. Upon a closer investigation we uncovered that all of the passive checks were being executed every 5 minutes from servers that were all synced to the same time server. The result? Hundreds of checks were all coming in with a few seconds, putting a heavy load on Nagios, while the other 4 minutes and 50 seconds were going virtually unused by the server. After some discussion on this we decided to make use of a built-in tool for Nagios – nagiostats – and create a wizard that could monitor Nagios itself to see how the checks were coming in and being processed. Although multiple checks have been written in the past, we’ve created a new wizard that allows you to quickly create several checks against the nagiostats binary to monitor the monitoring environment itself. We’ve just released a 1.0 version of this wizard and we’re curious to know what users think of it. Feel free to give it a try and send us your feedback!
Wizard Preview
Graphs from the Nagiostats Wizard
