Might sounds like a strange title since Vietnam is by no means a part of China but we decided to take a vacation from our vacation and head over to Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. The first part of this trip has already been chronicled in the first trip report: Trip to China: Dong Xing, Part 1 <http://www.medin.name/blog/2013/03/14/trip-to-china-dong-xing-part-1/> and later parts will be published in a bit.

This will be a rather lengthy post about my travels in China. I was planning to blog regularly whilst in China but the internet situation made that difficult (also I was on vacation and being lazy). This first edition is about the first week or so we spent in DongXing before heading down into Vietnam and onward to Shenzhen which will come in the later editions.

The biggest reason for Nagios success is the ability to extend it with custom scripts which makes it one of the most powerful monitoring systems. Now Nagios is not the only place where you can extend your monitoring! NSClient++ provides many ways to extend it with scripts and since I have gotten many questions about how to use scripts with NSClient++ lately I have decided to write this tutorial to help sort out the concepts.

The best PACKT book ever?

Now don’t get excited!

This is not saying much; most PACKT books are so bad I want to gauge my eyes out with a fork!

And indeed this book is no exception it has many flaws and I honestly think is a bad book which suffers from lack of editing and peer review.

But is is *a very very smart book* and the author has managed to pull something rather difficult off in very nice way. I think with some editing this would have made a truly amazing book.

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.

NRPE is a common easy to use option for monitoring remote machines from Nagios or Icinga. Unfortunately NRPE, with **out of the box setup,* is not what I would consider secure.*

This tutorial looks at how you can secure your NRPE traffic by using NSClient++ both as a client and server (yes it runs on Linux as well) in conjunction with SSL certificates to provide certificate based authentication.

Stateful scripts are a simple yet powerfully way to enhance your monitoring which I think is used far to little. Using stateful script you can easily add simple predictions and change management. This is very easy to accomplished using NSClient++ as its built-in scripting modules by default provides stateful scripts (in contrast to Nagios and Icinga which tends to be stateless). This tutorial will walk you through writing a simple stateful script in Lua. If you are still confused about stateful scripts the main benefit is that they remember things. Thus you can alert when something changes as well as predict the future. A good example of this is disk growth prediction but there are a lot of other scenarios where they are useful.

Time for yet another tutorial this time detailing how to monitoring log files both event log and regular text files. The event log parts will build a bit on the earlier posts on monitoring the event log but since the “event log cache” feature has been replaced by the generic SimpleCache in 0.4.1 as well as 0.4.1 introducing a new SimpleFileWriter module as well  I felt it was time to re-visit this topic.

On OSMC 2012 I presented NSClient++ 0.4.1 not really presenting new features as such but more focusing on how to use the new version of NSClient++. In addition to explain various parts of the new Agent I did some demos which of course does not show very well in the slides so here I have presented the demos in a bit more details. I have also, in the slides, elaborated a bit more to at least give the commands I used. Slides can be found here.

As always Netways arranged for the yearly Open Source Monitoring Conference in Nürenburg.  As always I was suckered into coming.

I had originally planned not to come but alas since my planned vacation was postponed I decided on going. This is a short review of the sessions I attended and my impressions of the conference as a whole.