Bacula-users

Re: [Bacula-users] New Wiki entry - Nagios monitoring

2009-04-06 04:20:21
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] New Wiki entry - Nagios monitoring
From: Kevin Keane <subscription AT kkeane DOT com>
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 01:15:43 -0700
Silver Salonen wrote:
> On Monday 06 April 2009 03:30:56 John Drescher wrote:
>   
>>> I've seen a couple requests over time for monitoring bacula with Nagios.
>>> So I put a writeup of my solution on the Bacula Wiki at
>>> http://wiki.bacula.org/doku.php?id=nagios
>>>       
>> Thank You. That looks very detailed. When I have some free time at
>> work I will implement this on the most important servers.
>>     
> Hello.
>
> Maybe the other approach (Nagios' active checks) should be listed too?
Good idea. How about you write a wiki page to describe how you do it? 
That's the beauty of Wikis.

Personally, I think that for bacula backups, passive checks are actually 
the better tool in most situations, because bacula knows exactly when a 
status changes, while nagios would have to keep polling. But the beauty 
of open source is: if you feel differently, you can do it differently!

Active checks would be very good to make sure that the bacula-sd, 
bacula-fd, director and database are running properly, for instance.
> There are several plugins made for that:
>
> * http://www.nagiosexchange.org/cgi-bin/page.cgi?g=2984.html - plugin that 
> checks Bacula log file (I haven't used it myself)
>   
I have. As a matter of fact, the solution I described in the Wiki page 
replaced that one. The plugin works as advertised, and may be good for 
simple monitoring needs. But ultimately, it didn't give me enough 
information.

It simply returns OK if no backups have failed since midnight (even if 
none have run that should have run), or warning if one or more backups 
have failed since midnight. The status remains "warning" until exactly 
midnight, and then reverts to OK. The plugin also reports the total 
number of jobs since midnight, and the number of jobs that have failed.

On the plus side: I add or remove bacula jobs on a somewhat regular 
basis. My current solution requires me to update Nagios correspondingly; 
this plugin does not need any updating.
> * check_nagios.pl (by Julian Hein, www.netways.de) - plugin that queries 
> Bacula database. I'm using this myself and I've made some minor changes to 
> the 
> script. I'm not sure about permission to redistribute the script though - 
> there's nothing said about that in the script, so.. what should be assumed? :)
>   
That script could be interesting. I'm generally not a big fan of 
bypassing UIs and accessing a database directly, but it seems to be the 
bacula philosophy to begin with.

As for redistribution: if in doubt, assume that it is not GPL. I didn't 
find the script on either nagiosexchange or netways.de, so unless the 
script is trivial, it probably is only included with support from 
netways.de. Or maybe he simply forgot to publish it. The only way to 
find out for sure is to ask.

-- 
Kevin Keane
Owner
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