A tutorial for writing a quick and simple Lua script which will turn check_cpu into a multi functional check which return top CPU consumers. In last weeks edition I introduced the various parts we need to make this a reality. And that idea I have with NSClient++ is to create a Lego box with small multi purpose functions which the users can combine in many different ways. Here I will show you how we can do that.

As always I really enjoyed the conference as much as the social aspect of it. It truly is one of the best conferences in the field. This was my sixth year which as I noted earlier started out a bit weird. I will not cover the limousine story here again instead this is purely about the conference.

The conference started off with the usual introduction by bernd who did it in English this year which I think was nice but quite frankly the usual “food is in the food area” and “conference is in the conference are” I can pretty much understand even in German. As I only speak English I will, as usual, only cover the English track here.

A lot of people coming to NSClient++ has a background in NRPE since it is a common transport mechanism for check results on Linux.

And while NSClient++ is fully NRPE compatible it allows for more control and has more features which can make it seem difficult to get started with. This is a guide for getting started with NSClient++ from a NRPE perspective.

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.

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.

Take your monitoring to the next level by creating self-resetting event log checks. Sometimes it is not only faults which can be harvested from the windows event log many applications will also report a message when the state returns to normal. This tutorial show you how to configure NSClient++ 0.4.1 to setup auto resetting event log checks. In addition to using passive checks via NSCA I will also demonstrate how to use the Cache module to benefit from real time event log checks via NRPE.

Well, since I got an email from Würth Phoenix asking me to plug their conference Which has been renamed again this year calling itself Open Source System Management Conference 2012. Ironically enough they forgot to include the link making it a bit difficult to give some information but a quick google reviled this page http://www.wuerth-phoenix.com/en/company/event/nagios-event/. Since I figured it would be a dreadfully short blog post with just a single conference I figured I’d mention the other once I know about as well.