My name is Merlyn Pease, I work for a e-learning ASP in Columbia Maryland. I have been working with Nagios/Netsaint for the last 2 1/2 years. I wanted to pass a email along to say thanks in making my life easier ;) and to pass some information along to you.

I was in need to find a way to send syslog messages from my farm of SUN Netra servers on to Nagios. I have searched and searched for ways on how to do this, but I was unable to find such information, so I went at it alone.
My first step was to get syslog-ng, and send_nsca compiled for Solaris - that's all done and working. The second step was the configuration of syslog-ng and the send_nsca programs, and that is all working also. 

The Idea behind this is as soon as a syslog-ng message arrives it sends a message to a named pipe file i.e. nagios.pipe (mkfifo nagios.pipe). Then I have a script running in a loop that reads the lines in that pipe file and sends the info to the send_nsca plugin, and it sends it on to the Nagios server, which handles the notifications accordingly. Plus the syslog info that is sent is secure by use of the encryption capabilities that are part of the send_nsca program. Also another benefit is the syslog messages from the servers would be centralized in Nagios.

I must also say that a template based config for Nagios is so much cleaner and easier to handle. Also I have attached some of the syslog-ng.conf file and script, all of it should be self explained. 

Thanks again!
Merlyn J. Pease
System Administrator
MPease@genphysics.com