bischeck

Project Notes

The bischeck plugin is a standalone plugin server that is integrated with Nagios using passive checks over the NSCA, NRDP or Livestatus protocol, but also with Graphite and OpenTSDB. bischeck is aimed to monitor business applications and to provide built in support for complex monitor tasks and threshold management, like:

- Enable a dynamic configuration of threshold values depending of time of the day and day of month or week. This support a typical business process like a order management system where the order numbers are different depending on the time of the day and probably higher in the end of the month.

- Support threshold based on fixed values and thresholds based on the measured value from other monitored entities. This is key when we have business process that follow a other process. The number of invoices produced will typical “follow” the number of orders received then a fixed predefined value.

- Configure monitored entity that are based on multiple measured entities, what could be described as "virtual" entities. This enables the creation of new key entities that are not measured directly from a system but created in bischeck. One simple example would be to measure the measure the ratio between invoices and orders.

- Support date macros in execution statements of measured entities, typical used in a where clause when selecting from databases. The macro enables that a statement can always use the current time in any date formatted format. The functionality also include functionality to do calculation on the current date specifying number of days or month prior or after the current date.

- Support a multitude of ways to connected t o a the entity to measure by allowing custom service connection methods. A user can simply develop custom connection classes to access any type of system just by following a simple API.

- Support for custom threshold classes to enable any way to define threshold logic just by following a simple API interface.

bischeck is written in Java and utilize the excellent jsendnsca package to communicate with the nsca daemon on the nagios server. bischeck can of course run on the same server as Nagios or on a remote server.

For bischeck own surveillance bischeck use the Java JMX standard.

For more information about bischeck and its capabilities please visit www.bischeck.org.