Integrate different Nagios webservers

Question

I have different sites running with 4 to 5 server at each location. All the locations have one monitoring server with Nagios. Now I want to create a central location and want to combine all the nagios services running at each location. Can anyone please point me to some documentation for these type of jobs.

Answer 1

There are two approaches that you can take.

1. Install a new Nagios core as you did at each location and perform active checks on each of the remote hosts. You'll likely end up installing NRPE on each of the remote hosts at each location and can read this document for the details: http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/nrpe/NRPE.pdf. If your remote servers are Windows servers, you can use NSClient to much of the same things that NRPE does for Linux hosts. This effectively centralizes your monitoring server. I also wrote some how-to style entries for using NRPE to run privileged commands http://blog.gnucom.cc/?p=479 or to run event handlers http://blog.gnucom.cc/?p=458. If you get tired of installing NRPE, you can use my script here http://blog.gnucom.cc/?p=185. I also have instructions to install NSClient here http://blog.gnucom.cc/?p=201.

2. Install a new Nagios core as you did at each location and perform passive checks by instructing the remote Nagios cores to feed their results to the new central Nagios core's passive command file. I haven't done this myself, so I'm going to point you to the communities documentation here http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/passivechecks.html. You could probably look at my event handler post to set up event handlers that send checks to the main server.

From my personal experience, the first option I mentioned is easier to implement, and is far easy to administer. However, as your server fleet grows you'll start seeing major CPU bottlenecks with the main Nagios core. This is where passive checks would become beneficial, as the main Nagios core simply waits for critical checks to be sent to it rather than having to check them itself.

Hope this helps. :)