[op5-users] Merlin? What is it?

[Andreas Ericsson]

Gabriel - IP Guys wrote:
> Mr Gabriel said,
> 
> "So, to clarify, how many systems can be connected to the Merlin
> daemon?"
> 
> Mr Andreas Ericsson replied,
> 
> So the real answer is "more than you can possibly imagine, although
> you'll run out of bandwidth if you really, really try"
> 
> Mr Andreas Ericsson - I salute the above statement, it's almost like a
> challenge! I think I'm going to like the Merlin project.
> 
> It would be so nice, if I could just build a system, and tell it to
> connect to a daemon on my client nodes, and retrieve their current
> status, (which is nagios/op5), but it would be beautiful, if each of
> those systems dumped their data and logs into a database backend, and
> also retrieved all their hosts details from that same database, at least
> that would mean that I would never really have to reconfigure my setup,
> and I could just add monitoring nodes with very minimal
> configuration....
> 

Well, assuming the daemon implements the Merlin event protocol (which is
really simple and can be taken straight out of Merlin itself), and Merlin
gets rid of its need to have every new poller pre-configured in its
configuration file, that setup is not far away. If I were to drop
everything else and work only on that, I'd have it ready by the end of
july.

For now though, Merlin connects only to other Merlin daemons, and Merlin
itself has no checking capabilities, so it relies on Nagios to do its
checking for it.

Perhaps we need to extend its capabilities to also schedule and execute
checks. With the runcmd() api I implemented for the plugins project some
years back and a fixed-time scheduler, this wouldn't be difficult at all.
Since the connection needn't be persistent, one Merlin instance could
well serve a network of several thousand nodes, and a network of Merlin
instances would easily serve "more than you can imagine" ;-)

I think I'll have to add that to my "todo-if-I-ever-have-time".

> 
> ... well, I guess an Admin can dream!

So can programmers. It's nice when the two dreams are the same ;-)

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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