To those that were hoping to attend the Aiki Linux presentation on the 2016 Nagios World Conference, We are sorry to say that we just got a notice from Nagios.com announcing the cancellation of the event :

“We regret to inform you that we have made the difficult decision to cancel the 2016 Nagios World Conference due to lower than anticipated attendance.  As a scheduled speaker, we appreciate the work you put into preparing for the conference and want to thank you for volunteering to speak.”

It is a sad day to see that a project that for a long time has been benchmark and the leading product in IT monitoring has fallen back with the times so much that his main conference has been cancelled due to low interest.

AikiLinux has been accepted to talk in the Nagios World Conference, where we will speak  on the subject of Metric Led Development or When should you start monitoring.

Assaf Flatto will be travelling to the US and speak.

In many environments I find myself “teaching” employees how to work with a monitoring system: why nagios is sending more then one alert , why they were unable to acknowledge an issue , why they did not get a notification about an event they saw on the dashboard , what the benefit of the scheduled downtime is , and many other things that come with working with nagios.

Almost always the question comes up “is there an automated way we can have to do all those things ?” , well, the answer to this is always “Yes , and No” .

Yes – there is the External commands that are available to communicate with the nagios core process and allow you to submit actions without using the Web Ui .

No – to each command there are somewhat different parameters and you will need to know which ones need to be added for which command , otherwise the request will fail .

So I have been working on trying to allow the user to “simplify” the access to the cgi and wrote a script :

#!/bin/bash

usage (){
echo “usage :sumbit_cgi_option.sh <Host> <Service> <Comment>  <username> <password> <cmd_mod> ”
echo -e -n “The script requires several parameters in order to work :\n”
echo -e -n “\tHost = The short hostname [i.e lmmapp2801].\n”
echo -e -n “\tService = The descriptive service name  [i.e Jave Core Dump], a name containing spaces should be encapsulated in single quotes ‘ ‘ .\n”
echo -e -n “\tComment = A descriptive comment pretainig to the issue. \n”
echo -e -n “\tUsername  = Your Nagios interface login name. \n”
echo -e -n “\tPassword = Your Nagios Interface password.\n”
echo -e -n “\tcmd_mod = should the command run on a host level or a service level :\n”
echo -e -n ” \t\t2 = Service Level (Prefered Method)\n”
echo -e -n ” \t\t1 = Host Level \n”
}

type_host () {
echo -e -n ” CMD_ADD_HOST_COMMENT\t                            1\n”
echo -e -n ” CMD_SCHEDULE_HOST_DOWNTIME        \t              55\n”
}
type_svc(){
echo -n -e ” CMD_ADD_SVC_COMMENT\t                              3\n”
echo -n -e ” CMD_SCHEDULE_SVC_DOWNTIME          \t             56\n”
echo -n -e ” CMD_SCHEDULE_HOST_SVC_DOWNTIME \t                 86\n”
}

if [ $# -ne  6 ] || [ $# -eq 0 ] ;then
usage
exit 1
fi

HOST=$1
SERVICE=$2
COMMENT=$3
NAGURL=http://10.173.4.82/nagios/cgi-bin/cmd.cgi
USER=$4
PASS=$5
CMD_MOD=$6

echo Scheduling downtime on nagios

if [ $6 -eq “1” ] ; then
echo “Enter the Host command type:”
type_host
read CMD_TYPE
if  [ $CMD_TYPE -eq  “55” ]  ; then
echo “Enter the Downtime Length (in minutes):”
read LENGTH
STARTDATE=`date +%d-%m-%Y\ %H:%M:%S`
ENDDATE=`date –date=”+$LENGTH minutes” +%d-%m-%Y\ %H:%M:%S`
curl $NAGURL -u $USER:$PASS –silent –show-error \
–data cmd_typ=$CMD_TYPE \
–data cmd_mod=$CMD_MOD \
–data host=$HOST \
–data “service=$SERVICE”  \
–data “com_data=$COMMENT” \
–data trigger=0 \
–data “start_time=$STARTDATE” \
–data “end_time=$ENDDATE” \
–data fixed=1 \
–data hours=2 \
–data minutes=0 \
–data btnSubmit=Commit | grep -q “Your command request was successfully submitted to Nagios for processing.” ;
else
STARTDATE=`date +%d-%m-%Y\ %H:%M:%S`
curl $NAGURL -u $USER:$PASS –silent –show-error \
–data cmd_typ=$CMD_TYPE \
–data cmd_mod=$CMD_MOD \
–data host=$HOST \
–data “service=$SERVICE”  \
–data “com_data=$COMMENT” \
–data trigger=0 \
–data “start_time=$STARTDATE” \
–data btnSubmit=Commit | grep -q “Your command request was successfully submitted to Nagios for processing.” ;
fi
echo Scheduled downtime for $HOST
exit
fi

if [ $6 -eq “2 ” ] ; then
echo “Enter the Service command type:”
type_svc
read CMD_TYPE
if  [ $CMD_TYPE -eq  “56” ]  || [ $CMD_TYPE -eq  “86” ]; then
echo “Enter the Downtime Length  (in minutes):”
read LENGTH
STARTDATE=`date +%d-%m-%Y\ %H:%M:%S`
ENDDATE=`date –date=”+$LENGTH minutes” +%d-%m-%Y\ %H:%M:%S`
curl $NAGURL -u $USER:$PASS –silent –show-error \
–data cmd_typ=$CMD_TYPE \
–data cmd_mod=$CMD_MOD \
–data host=$HOST \
–data “service=$SERVICE”  \
–data “com_data=$COMMENT” \
–data trigger=0 \
–data “start_time=$STARTDATE” \
–data “end_time=$ENDDATE” \
–data fixed=1 \
–data hours=2 \
–data minutes=0 \
–data btnSubmit=Commit | grep -q “Your command request was successfully submitted to Nagios for processing.” ;
else
STARTDATE=`date +%d-%m-%Y\ %H:%M:%S`
curl $NAGURL -u $USER:$PASS –silent –show-error \
–data cmd_typ=$CMD_TYPE \
–data cmd_mod=$CMD_MOD \
–data host=$HOST \
–data “service=$SERVICE”  \
–data “com_data=$COMMENT” \
–data trigger=0 \
–data “start_time=$STARTDATE” \
–data btnSubmit=Commit | grep -q “Your command request was successfully submitted to Nagios for processing.” ;
fi
echo Scheduled downtime for $SERVICE in host $HOST
exit
fi

I have tested it and it works well , but it still is limited in the functionality it provides so I am thinking of converting this to a PHP page/url that will allow the same functionality , but that will have to wait till i can find the time .

Yesterday I recieved a mail from Nagios.com informing me that their certification program is finally available on line, so I decided to see what the facility for the test is like .

The latest version of Nagios was announced yesterday  (Nagios core 3.4.0 released ), So today AikiLinux grabbed the new source code and gave it a test run.