[op5-users] Merlin? What is it?

[Andreas Ericsson]

Andriy Skuratov wrote:
> Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>> Most certainly not. Centrally scheduled checks are ofcourse vitally
>> important to check network services, but to execute local checks such
>> as CPU load, disk usage, mem usage, running processes and whatnot it
>> would help a lot if the various systems themselves could take care of
>> doing that.
>>   
> It sounds very much the way it is done here on N-iX. We use nagios for 
> centralized availability checks + servers have tool called `monit` installed 
> that is gathering all that info (CPU load, disk usage, mem usage, running 
> processes). Monit also boasts features like `if apache is down start it again` 
> etc see http://mmonit.com/monit/. The only thing is that admins have to 
> implement some kind of basic centralized info gathering for it themselves.
> 
> So it can be a good idea to make monit able to communicate to merlin instead of 
> implementing local checks in merlin. Then we can have info from nagios and 
> different monits in one ninja GUI. Or smth like that.
> 

Yes. The merlin module would have to be given the capabilities of adding
new services (and possibly hosts) to Nagios, but that's a rather small
thing to do and ties in with the distributed configuration thoughts I've
been having. Ninja would then be totally transparent, and Merlin would
provide the magic glue between Nagios and Monit (effectively adding
monit checks as passive checks) in such a way that Ninja needn't bother
with the implementation details at all. That would be infinitely
preferrable to adding glue to all layers, I think.

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

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