Nagios to Orion migration - Best practice for migrating custom scripts?

We are currently migrating from nagios to solarwinds and I am now looking into the best way to migrate our custom nagios check scripts to solarwinds. We have rhel5 servers and have installed net-snmp on all of them.

We have a few custom nagios check scripts, a good example is a shell script that does a "sudo multipath -l | egrep error|faulty|blabla" and returns an error if any fibre path is down.

I would prefer to only use snmp on the servers and not enable ssh from solarwinds to the servers if possible so I have found that it is possible to add some of these scripts to snmpd.conf as exec/extend:

extend .x.x.x.x.x multipath /usr/share/snmp/scripts/check_multipath

.x.x.x.x is a OID that we will create a custom poller for in solarwinds.

I would like know your thoughts for using this approach. I find it to be simplest solution but there might be drawbacks?

Thanks for any comments ...

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NickBhavsar

Hi Goran,

Have you tried the Open Source Script Processor? Custom Application Monitoring - Monitor Custom App | SolarWinds

It lets you use your Nagios scripts directly into Orion Application Performance Monitor.

-Nick

GoranTornqvist

No, but i believe I read a bit about it and (correct me if Im wrong) that solution copies the script thru ssh/scp to the server and executes it and then removes it. It also probably requires a ssh public key to be distributed to all server + a lot of configuration so that ssh key can only be used to execute certain explicit scripts.
It would be nice to able to avoid all the extra configuration.

I´ve been playing around with this "snmp exec" solution a bit this week and technically it works fine.
For example, time is crucial on our servers so I have added a script that gets time offset in seconds compared to the ntp server defined in ntp.conf. I created a Universal Device Poller that polls the scripts OID and generates a line graph for this + added an alert if time offset is larger than 0.5 seconds.

Some nagios checks will however probably be changed to log to solarwinds syslog instead.

Yann

Hi Goran,

Since your requirement is to not allow Orion NPM/APM SSH access to your equipements, this seems to be the only alternative to actively monitor the results of your Nagios scripts.

I just tested it and it works (very well

If you choose to use this solution, here are some Pro/Cons you will face compared to using a Linux Script monitor.

Cons:

1) You need to create UnDP for each scripts populated in the nsExtensions MIB (1.3.6.1.4.1.8072.1.3). (Well it takes as long as creating a Linux Script monitor

2) The results cannot be integrated in the APM web console (e.g. TOP 10 Components that are down). only through the UnDP resource or using Reports

3) You cannot leverage any of the APM features using this method regarding the results returned.

Pro:

1) UnDP results are easier to work with to create Historical statistics Reports.

2) No transfer of scripts across the network through SSH/SCP.

3) More flexible than Linux Script Monitor regarding what the scripts could return (exit code, multiple lines comments, etc.)

HTH,

Yann