Nagios is as I have mentioned many times before a useful monitoring tool that you can use to give yourself and your team the heads up about problems as soon as they are detected. The provision and presentation of information in Nagios is not as slick (at the moment) as some of the competition but todays tip relates to getting the current status of Nagios into your Windows Vista or Windows 7 sidebar.
First some plumbing required. You will need the NagStatus script from http://nagstatus.com/ - this needs to be placed in the same directory as the other cgi scripts on your Nagios server – in my case the nagios/sbin directory and be made executable. On Ubuntu I found a missing dependency which I installed using
apt-get install libxml-libxml-perl
You should then be able to test by running the following command in the sbin directory.
if you get the stream of output representing the xml you are nearly there. Next is to test from a web browser
http://serveripaddress/nagios/cgi-bin/nagxmlstatus.cgi?node=all&elem=all
shows my nagios setup and the url required to get xml rendered to IE8 in this case. If you don’t get what you are expecting edit the .cgi file and check that you entered the location of the status.dat file !!
When you do get the output now you can focus on just getting the gadget installed and configured. Once downloaded and in your sidebar – the final details need to be added. You will have to enter the location of the Nagios Web UI -> this will be in the form http://serverip/nagios/ and then the XML status provider URL which is the full path to the cgi script for example
http://serveripaddress/nagios/cgi-bin/nagxmlstatus.cgi
Enter the username and password you normally use to access Nagios and hopefully you’ll get the status of the nagios monitored hosts displayed. Clicking on the status of the hosts causes a flyout to appear with the detail of the issues listed.
So there you have it – Nagios in your Windows sidebar…..
Note – there are a few things I would change – for example excluding Hosts in scheduled downtime and allowing links directly to the Nagios main and summary pages – but these may well appear in new releases – I’ll keep you posted.
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A recent update to WordPress was issued
In summary 2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.
Get updating then !!
This was a package I came across while researching notification methods and options for Nagios to improve ease of information filtering for colleagues (more about that in later posts) but the name of the psoftware is Growl. Based on an OS/X package Growl has been ported for windows and comes with a range of plugins and other tools to allow you to create a notification system for glueing together disparate systems into one focal point for notifications . For example I’ve used the addin for gmail to allow me to monitor a remote gmail account.
The developers describe the port of the application as
Ok, so what is Growl?
Put simply, Growl lets you know when things happen. Files finished downloading, friends came online, new email has arrived – Growl can let you know when any event occurs with a subtle notification. The rest of the time, Growl stays out of your way.
Along with letting you know when things happen, Growl also gives you full control over how you are notified and what action (if any) you want to take in response to the notification. You can choose to be alerted with a visual indicator or an audible alert, both, or neither. You can choose the type of display that is shown, whether the display remains on the screen, the importance of the notification, and even if the notification should be forwarded to another computer. You can have notifications that trigger an email, run a script, launch a program, or are read out loud.
So hopefully that should be enough choices for you !!
A commandline tool for Windows machines was my first port of call to allow me to bundle some other testing I have to do without coding. Its part of the installation of Growl for windows and is called GrowlNotify. You’ll get more info here on the options http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/help/growlnotify.aspx
You can access Growl here
So go get some growly goodness and I’m sure there will be more on this topic before long …..
TIP
On Vista 64 Bit I had to make a change to the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file before the growlnotify test would work.
A simple grownotify “hello” failed with
Notifcation failed:201 – The destination server was not reachable
Specifically
::1 localhost
After I changed that to:
127.0.0.1 localhost
the notifcation worked
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