Articles March 3, 2010 at 7:38 pm

A Plugin for Monitoring Server Admin with Nagios

For those who haven't tried it, Nagios is quite a cool monitoring package that will run on UNIX (Ed. There fixed that!) variants, including OS X Server.  John C. Welch wrote up an article on setting up Nagios with a Leopard Server which was my inspiration.  While running Nagios, you quickly find that the Plugin system of adding commands to communicate with servers, switches, and all SNMP-speaking devices is…well…awesome. It would be cool if there was a way to pull information out of your Server Admin-managed services and monitor it with Nagios.  I wrote up a small Google Doc on how to do just that.

 Using Felim Whiteley's libsrvrmgrd-osx package, you can pull a wealth of information out of Server Admin over port 311 on a machine running OS X Server the least of which is whether or not a service is running.

 The document is here https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AaQfhLeDuWNcZGNibTU2ODNfNTFjYnF6bjZucg&hl=en and I welcome all comments and suggestions!  

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  • Yeah, that was a dumb slipup on my part. On to fix the rest of the typos…

  • You have ideas on some obvious things that could be causing a Status Information “(null)”?

    Running the command line command from my mac to the 10.6 host works successfully. However, as soon as I transfer everything to the Nagios server (RHEL), I get the null status information. I attempt to do the same command line command on the RHEL server, and I get the error:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “./srvrafp”, line 44, in ?
    import plistlib
    ImportError: No module named plistlib

    Any suggestions would be great, especially since I can use this instead of NRPE for my Macs!

  • I tracked down the plistlib.py and added it to my RHEL python. Magic! Command line command works like a champ now.

    However, I am now getting “401” in the web interface instead of “null”. Any idea what could be the issue?

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