Solaris check_vitals

Big Brother has larrd (or butter) to create trend graphs that are easily integrated (via bbgen, for example). I wanted to recreate this feature and created this plug-in.

The plug-in requires Perl (tested on 5.8.x).

At this time only vmstat (scan rate, paging activity, memory utilization, context switches and interrupts, system calls, and CPU utilization) and netstat (a good choice of TCP and UDP data) trending is supported. I am only able to test this on Solaris 8-10. It is possible that it also runs on other *nix OSs w/o any or just a few modifications. Let me know how it works out.



Installation:


* Copy the check_vitals into Nagios's libexec directory and make sure it can be executed remotely (via NRPE or NSCA, for example).


# on the remote server's side the following line appears in nrpe.conf

command[check_vitals]=/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_vitals $ARG1$



* Add two service checks to the servers you'd like to track:



# This example is using NRPE with arguments allowed

define command {

command_name check_vitals

command_line $USER1$/check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c check_vitals -t 210 -a $ARG1$

}



# This is a netstat check

define service {

service_description health_netstat

check_command check_vitals!--netstat

....

}



# This is a vmstat check

define service {

service_description health_vmstat

check_command check_vitals!--vmstat

...

}



The plug-in accepts the following arguments:



--netstat

Return network related statistics.

--vmstat

Return memory and CPU related statistics.

--vmstat-delay=n

Run vmstat with n seconds interval (default is 100).

--vmstat-runs=n

Let vmstat run for n counts before data is retrieved (default is 2).



Some restrictions in Nagios do not allow to run the plug-in in netstat AND vmstat mode (the return string is too long and gets truncated). You must also make sure that the timeouts are adjusted accordingly because the plug-in takes at least vmstat-delay * vmstat-runs seconds to finish (default is 200 seconds) in vmstat mode. This does not apply to netstat mode.