Nagios client, Hobbit server anyone?

[Ward, Martin]

Hi all,

I have been presented with an 'interesting' problem in that I have been tasked with taking over the monitoring of a number machines (circa two dozen) that currently run Nagios clients (NRPE I guess but don't know for certain yet). I have been told that these machines have a few hundred (probably more like forty or fifty, but I don't know yet) separate checks that are performed by the Nagios client and the results passed back to the server. These Nagios checks work fine and have done so for a few years. The managers would prefer to keep the Nagios client up and running until I can provide them with a working, proven alternative.

I therefore have a few options open:
1. Install my own Nagios server and run Hobbit and Nagios side-by-side. Not a good option by any means. Why have two different monitoring applications?
2. Convert the Nagios scripts to Hobbit ones. This would likely entail running both monitoring clients on each machine and copying/rewriting the monitor scripts one at a time, checking the results with both Nagios and Hobbit to ensure that alerts and reports are happening correctly. Once all scripts are converted, remove the Nagios client. This has clear benefits but is naturally going to take time, and pain, and will require that I have two monitor consoles, albeit temporarily.
3. Write a program that acts like a Hobbit proxy server, listening on the Nagios port and translating the Nagios reports and alerts in to Hobbit ones. This has benefits in that there will only be one bit of code to write, albeit a potentially large bit. I will have written the code so if it breaks I can fix it. The downside is that there is going to be a considerable amount of time involved in writing the proxy program and I will have to learn how Nagios packets are written and how the Hobbit proxy works.
4. I see if anyone more able than I has done anything remotely like this that I can beg or borrow to use.
5. Something else that I haven't thought of...

I thought I'd try option 4 first!

|\/|artin

--  
Martin W. Ward
TAC Network Systems Team Leader
COLT
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Email: martin.ward at colt.net 
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