Putting some client into NSClient
Posted by Michael Medin at 2012-12-16

NSClient++ despite its name is most often used in server mode responding to remote calls via either NRPE or check_nt. The closest thing to a client we get in normal mode of operation is NSCA where we submit data back. But NSClient++ can act as a client as well which is not just something I use for unit testing but something which can actually be useful in your monitoring environment.
A good example of a really useful feature is creating a proxy or use NSClient++ as proxies to add intelligence (see my post earlier on writing stateful scripts Enhance your monitoring with stateful scripts).
We will quickly go though the command line interface for using it is a check client following that we will look at using the clients from within NSClient++ both from checks and scripts and finally we will setup a simple NRPE proxy for checking machines on a remote inaccessible network. As a bonus exercise I will show how to create a NRPE-to-NSCA proxy to create a passive-active bridge to help you transition from an active setup to a passive one if you are so inclined.
Introduction to clients
Before we start using the which has been touched briefly many times before in various blog posts so I will try to explain some of the underlying concepts you will encounter.
Command line context (client)
The first concept to understand is that the command line interface has “contexts” in our case we want to use the "client context". But many protocols has short hands to reduce the typing thus the following two commands are equivalent:
- nscp client --module NRPEClient
- nscp nrpe
I tend use the latter format for brevity but it is important to understand that is is merely an alias.
Command line arguments
The second important thing to understand is that running nsclient++ is client mode means arguments are picked up by two different components. First we have the "loader" which accepts arguments such as log, help etc etc. Then we have the loaded module which accept arguments such as host and port.
To make this transparent for the user the loader will pass along any unknown options and use (eat) all the ones it knows about. This is all well and good as long as the options are distinctly different. For instance *--host* will never be used by the loader. But as soon as we have options which are used by both parties such as *--help*it will becomes a bit awkward because unexpectedly the loader might pickup options we intended for the module. To work around this you can use the double dash (--) to denote that all options after this will be intended for the module (and ignored b the loader).
The best illustration for this is to compare the result of these two commands:
- nscp nrpe --help
- nscp nrpe *--** --help*
The first will give you information about logging and other things which the loader will understand the latter will give you information about nrpe connection details which the module understands.
Operation mode: Query/Exec/Submit?
NSClient++ support several "modes" which are modeled on top of Nagios the various monitoring paradigms.
We have (currently) three main modes (with a fourth planned):
- Query modeled on top of NRPE In simple terms this is "check_xxx" which results in a return status, a message and performance data.
- Submit modeled on top of NSCA In simple terms this is telling the remote node status, a message and performance data.
- Exec intended to execute functions This is similar to query but the data is more free form.
Which one to use depends on what we want to accomplish but in general if you use NRPE you probably want query. if you are using NSCA or NRDP you probably want submit. And if you want to run remote scripts you probably want exec.
Using the command line
Using the command line
Now that we have sorted out the important bits we end up with the following to run as a nrpe client:
- nscp nrpe -- ...
And we just stack all options at the end much like we would with check_nrpe.
If we instead want to submit via NSCA we simply replace nrpe with nsca and stack on various options related to submissions instead. So what are the options?
Well, best way is to use the --help command like so:
Common options:
-H [ --host ] arg The host of the host running the server
-P [ --port ] arg The port of the host running the server
--address arg The address (host:port) of the host running the server
-T [ --timeout ] arg Number of seconds before connection times out
(default=10)
-t [ --target ] arg Target to use (lookup connection info from config)
-q [ --query ] Force query mode (only useful when this is not already
obvious)
-s [ --submit ] Force submit mode (only useful when this is not already
obvious)
-e [ --exec ] Force exec mode (only useful when this is not already
obvious)
-h [ --help ] Display help information
.. raw:: html
</p>
Command: query:
-c [ --command ] arg The name of the query that the remote daemon
should
run
-a [ --arguments ] arg list of arguments
--query-command arg The name of the query that the remote daemon
should
run
--query-arguments arg list of arguments
Command: submit:
-c [ --command ] arg The name of the command that the remote daemon
should
run
-a [ --alias ] arg Same as command
-m [ --message ] arg Message
-r [ --result ] arg Result code either a number or OK, WARN, CRIT,
UNKNOWN
Common options for nrpe:
-n [ --no-ssl ] Do not initial an ssl handshake with the server,
talk in plaintext.
--certificate arg Length of payload (has to be same as on the
server)
--dh arg The pre-generated DH key (if ADH is used this
will be your 'key' though it is not a secret key)
--certificate-key arg Client certificate to use
--certificate-format arg Client certificate format (default is PEM)
--ca arg A file representing the Certificate authority
used to validate peer certificates
--verify arg Which verification mode to use: none: no
verification, peer: that peer has a certificate,
peer-cert: that peer has a valid certificate, ...
--allowed-ciphers arg Which ciphers are allowed for legacy reasons
this
defaults to ADH which is not secure preferably
set this to DEFAULT which is better or a an even
stronger cipher
-l [ --payload-length ] arg Length of payload (has to be same as on
the
server)
--buffer-length arg Same as payload-lenght (used for legacy reasons)
--ssl Initial an ssl handshake with the server.
As you can see there is a lot of options but a lot of it is for various things you probably wont need initially so if we remove ssl/certificate related options (Which you can find more about in the Securing NRPE With certificate based authentication) as well as all modes apart from query we end up with the following list:
Common options:
-H [ --host ] arg The host of the host running the server
-P [ --port ] arg The port of the host running the server
--address arg The address (host:port) of the host running the server
-T [ --timeout ] arg Number of seconds before connection times out
(default=10)
-t [ --target ] arg Target to use (lookup connection info from config)
-h [ --help ] Display help information
.. raw:: html
</p>
Command: query:
-c [ --command ] arg The name of the query that the remote daemon
should
run
-a [ --arguments ] arg list of arguments
Common options for nrpe:
-n [ --no-ssl ] Do not initial an ssl handshake with the server,
talk in plaintext.
And this is very similar to the check_nrpe options which in turns means it is very similar to how you use check_nrpe. So one might argue that the benefit to NSClient++ as a client is limited. And indeed it is but in contrast to NRPE which is essentially a dead project NSClient++ is evolving. For instance in 0.4.1 we introduced full SSL support and in 0.4.2 we are planning to add protocol tweaks to support passwords as well as variable length payloads.
As you saw there is a lot of options and going into them in detail is beyond the scope of this article so I will leave it with the following two examples:
- nrpe nscp nrpe -- --host 127.0.0.1 –port 5556 –command check_command –arguments foo bar
- nsca nscp nsca …
One thing I want to touch briefly before continuing is targets. A target is much like a host definition inside NSClient++ so instead of adding all the hosts ports and security details you can simply specify the target and configure the other options in the configuration file.
- nscp settings --path /settings/NRPE/client/targets --key **foo* --set 127.0.0.1*
Then we can use it like so:
- nscp nrpe -- --target **foo* --command check_ok*
Check client
So hopefully now you have a solid understanding of how the clients work lets move on and explore how you can use them from within NSClient++ as check commands.
Lets first load the NRPEClient and see which commands we have:
nscp settings --activate-module NRPEClient
Then we do
nscp test
…
commands
l ce\\simple\_client.hpp:57 \| nrpe\_exec: Execute (via query) remote
NRPE host
l ce\\simple\_client.hpp:57 \| nrpe\_forward: Forward query to remote
NRPE host
l ce\\simple\_client.hpp:57 \| nrpe\_help: Help on using NRPE Client
l ce\\simple\_client.hpp:57 \| nrpe\_query: Check remote NRPE host
l ce\\simple\_client.hpp:57 \| nrpe\_submit: Submit (via query) remote
NRPE host
As discussed earlier for NRPE most of these commands are not useful since NRPE is a single paradigm protocol. So lets focus on nrpe_query.
- nrpe_query --help
Now this screen looks surprisingly like the command line help screen and that is because this is in many ways exactly the same command.
So accessing a remote NRPE server we would use the following commands:
- nrpe_client -H 123.45.67.89 -c check_ok
- nrpe_client --host 123.45.67.89 --command check_ok
- nrpe_client host=123.45.67.89 command=check_ok
They are all the same but the last version is better suited to run from check_nrpe and other remote queries since they do not allow the -- syntax for options. So using clients from within NSClient++ is almost the exact same as using them from command line. But before we move on to the script lets revisit targets a bit. Previously the target was defined like this:
[/settings/NRPE/client/targets]
foo=127.0.0.1
This is marginally useful since all we can configure is host and port. What if we want to disable SSL as well? Then we use the longer object format instead which looks like this (notice the section name now includes the alias which means all the options in this section relates to the alias).
[/settings/NRPE/client/targets/foo]
address=127.0.0.1
ssl=false
Scripts
Scripts are very similar to the previous use cases (which has been the idea all along) the main difference is that we can now use both modes of execution.
- Queries This is exactly the same as using the nrpe_client command above.
- Executions This is the exact same as using nrpe from the command line above.
So we have already been through this but I will give a quick example here using Python.
core = Core.get()
.. raw:: html
</p>
args = [
'--command', 'check\_ping'
'--arguments', 'Hello World',
'--address', '127.0.0.1:5666',
]
# Using execution
(result\_code, result\_message) = core.simple\_exec('any',
'nrpe\_query', args)
# Using query:
(res, msg, perf) = core.simple\_query('nrpe\_query', args)
So now you might be wondering what the difference between execution and query is?
And as I mentioned initially the main difference between them is the way the data is sent. In a query for instance performance data is parsed, when you execute something the result is only raw text. The idea behind the execution mode is to execute commands not retrieve data. So in this case when we execute something we do not get performance data as a separate field.
NRPE proxy
So lets put all this together and execute some remote-remote checks but first lets set the scene so it will be simpler to keep track of things. We have our Monitoring Server server running check_nrpe against our Proxy server (running NSClient++) which in turn will use the NRPEClient to run the check against the Monitored Host.
First we need to configure the proxy
[/modules]
NRPEServer=enabled
NRPEProxy=enabled
[/settings/NRPE/server]
allowed hosts=10.0.0.1
allow arguments=true
.. raw:: html
</p>
Next we configure our remote NRPE on our Monitored Host to accept requests from our Proxy.
- [sourcecode language="actionscript3"]
- # Regular nrpe.cfg from our Linux server allowed_hosts=10.0.1.1 [/sourcecode]
Finally we execute our check from the monitoring server (here we use the syntax without -- since check_nrpe wont allow us to have -- or - in the arguments).
- check_nrpe -H 10.0.1.1 -c nrpe_query \ host=10.0.1.23 command=check_ok
Bonus section: NSCA-NRPE Proxy
I thought I would return to a subject I have brought up several times on various presentations since I think it is neat if not all that useful feature. But it is a good way to explain things you can do.
This is similar to the above NRPE Proxy solution but instead of scheduling checks from the Monitoring server we schedule them from the Proxy and submit them back passively via NSCA.
The setup on the Monitored Host is the same so all we need to do is change the Proxy configuration as below:
[/modules]
NRPEClient = enabled
NSCAClient = enabled
Scheduler = enabled
.. raw:: html
</p>
[/settings/NSCA/client/targets/remote\_host]
address = 10.0.0.1
encryption = xor
password = secret-password
[/settings/scheduler/schedules/remote\_host\_check\_ok]
; SCHEDULE ALIAS - The alias (service name) to report to server
alias = check\_ok
; SCHEDULE CHANNEL - Channel to send results on
channel = NSCA
; SCHEDULE COMMAND - Command to execute
command = nrpe\_query --host 10.0.1.23 --command check\_ok
; SCHEDULE INTERAVAL - Time in seconds between each check
interval = 5s
; TARGET - The target to send the message to (will be resolved by the
consumer)
target = remote\_host
The main difference is that we need to change NRPEServer for NSCAClient and of course configure our NSCA connection details including encryption and password. We also need to configure all our checks under the schedules section. In my case here I simply have a single one called remote_host_check_ok which runs check_ok on our remote host.
Conclusion
So that’s pretty much all you can do with clients. Hopefully you will find some cool and interesting things you can use in your monitoring infrastructure.
UPDATE:
As James Jimmy Burns (@JimBurns83) noticed nrpe_client does not support -- in arguments so I have updated both NSClient++ and the tutorial to instead use host=192.168.0.1 over --host 192.168.0 etc. (Notice that this syntax requires 0.4.1.73 of NSClient++)
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