nagios-cvnircbot
canvon IRC bot for monitoring Nagios monitoring
Send Nagios log messages to IRC, and let Nagios status be queried actively from IRC
This is an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) bot that parses the Nagios log file on the central IT infrastructure monitoring host and passes "interesting" things on to IRC. At the moment, that means it will send host/service alerts as notices, and notifications as normal messages addressed to the Nagios CONTACTNAME (which presumably is the same as a nick on IRC, otherwise just set a highlight in your IRC client).
The bot also can be talked to, which gives direct access to the Nagios status
file, currently via Icinga icli invocations (which is compatible to Nagios).
Addressing the bot and saying "problems" to it will dump the current state of
services with problems, either to the channel or query where it was addressed.
There are further commands, address the bot saying "help" to get a short
overview.
ToC
This README contains: (Table of Contents)
Setup
Basic setup
You can run the bot right from the git repository, as ./cvnircbot.pl; but you
have to copy the example-cvnircbotrc to ~/.cvnircbot/cvnircbotrc first, and
edit the file to set the IRC server to use, bot nickname, channel and other
things.
Be sure to set up your Nagios log file properly (undef will do, and default
to where it's stored on Debian -- otherwise, you probably want to set an
absolute path, but it can be any Perl expression). The default currently is
/var/log/nagios3/nagios.log.
Also be sure to set the nagios_channels to some of your bot channels so you
will be receiving the Nagios messages as intended.
If you like rather having output of what the software is doing than silence,
leave the debug definition in; otherwise, comment it out.
Bot commands
To make the active queries from IRC work, you'll also have to set up an icli
that can be invoked by the bot to get data. In my case, this is a wrapper script
in ~/bin/icli (it has to be on your $PATH) which uses sudo to aquire read
permissions on the Nagios status file. Often the group the web server runs in
will have such read permission. So I use (on Debian 8):
#!/bin/bash
exec sudo -g www-data icli --config /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg --status-file /var/cache/nagios3/status.dat "$@"
Save the two-liner to ~/bin/icli and chmod +x ~/bin/icli. Giving
password-less sudo permissions for group www-data (or what the webserver
your Nagios web-frontend is running on uses) to the user the bot runs as
is left as an exercise to the reader.
Log rotation
The bot currently does not cope with Nagios' automatic log rotation.
As a work-around, I recommend running the bot in a loop, like this:
nagios-cvnircbot$ while true ; do ./cvnircbot.pl ; sleep 600 ; done # restart every 10 minutes
Then make it exit regularly from cron. In a per-user crontab,
using crontab -e to edit and crontab -l to list:
# m h dom mon dow command
2 0 1 * * pkill cvnircbot.pl
This would make the bot exit on the 1st of each month, two minutes past mid-night. (This is just after my Nagios instance rotates its logs.) It will come back automatically after the timeout you set on the command line above expires.
Thanks
Thanks go to ArneB http://www.arneb.de/, for explaining how non-blocking I/O might be used to poll a log file from a Perl IRC bot.
Contact
The nagios-cvnircbot, canvon IRC bot for monitoring Nagios monitoring, has been written by:
- Fabian Pietsch fabian-cvnircbot@canvon.de (primary author from 2015-2016)
The project is currently (as of 2016-08-29) hosted on GitHub: