Nagira – Nagios RESTful API

Version {include:file:version.txt}

Light-weight web services API for fetching status of Nagios application objects:

• Objects file: hosts, services, contacts, (host|service|contact)groups, escalations, etc.

• Status file: hoststatus, servicestatus, etc.

1. Run Sinatra application ./app.rb

2. Use HTTP client to get information:

   curl localhost:4567/objects/contact/list

   curl localhost:4567/status/list

See more in {file:FEATURES.rdoc}

YARD documentation included with project, run ./jardoc in project’s root. Generatied YARD docs are available at dmytro.github.com/nagira/doc

First goal is to provide read-only access to the objects/object states by parsing 2 status files in Nagios: status.dat and objects.cache, later add check result submission interface (as in NSCA) and Nagios configuration.

objects.cache file keeps information about Nagios configuration (lists of servers, services, groups etc), while status.dat file is file that stores information about current state of the objects (hosts and services) and Nagios process itself.

If necessary at a later stages this could be implemented using Nagios’ NEB inteface, but the disadvantage of the NEB API is that it could block Nagios process and introduce latencies in Nagios.

File parsing obviously takes resources for each single parse, however if application – Rails, Sinatra or similar – is able to keep state of the parser, is not a problem. IF application can keep track of file parse times and file modification time it is possible to parse file only if it was changed and infrequently enough.

When implemented API could provide foundation for development of well-defined, modular, distributed Nagios monitoring: distributed Nagios nodes communicating with each other, retrieving status and submitting check results, distributed, load-balanced, fault tolerant configuration.

Web GUI (IMHO weakest part of the Nagios) could be completely de-coupled from Nagios core and is not required to run on the Nagios core host.

Read-only (GET) routes to access lists of monitored objects and states of the objects.

There are examples of various Nagios interfaces: NDOUTILS, IdoUtils, MK_Livestatus. This is an attempt to do similar things using web services API.

Replace NCSA passive checks submission mechanism with HTTP(S).

Still not sure how to implement this (requires Nagios restarts/reloads) POST/PUT/DELETE interfaces for configuring Nagios.

This is still far away…

Dmytro Kovalov, [email protected]

2011, Dec, 26th - started