I will be speaking at the Open Source System Management Conference  in Bolzano this year which is held at Sheraton on April 10.

My presentation will be about: "Why we do monitoring Wrong!" which is something I am rather passionate about and I will hopefully inspire some of you to drastically change how you do monitoring! I don't want to spoil anything but the future will eventually catch up with us...

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.

An often requested feature is to include the top-5 consumers of high CPU load in the result from check_cpu (or checkCpu). I have often discarded this as a non-core feature since it is not something I think should be part of NSClient++ instead I think it should be a script. Since no-one has created such a script I figured it would make a nice blog post so here I describe in a step by step guide how to create such a script for NSClient++.

This is a YouTube video from my presentation at OSMC this year. The good folks over at Netways kindly allowed me to post the video here on my blog.

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.

Just thought I'd drop a short note mentioning my presentation for NWCNA 2013 has been accepted and I will be presenting there.

The talk is (surprise surprise) about the new features of NSClient++ with a heavy focus on the up-coming 0.4.2 version which will take real-time monitoring to a whole new level.

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.