Monitoring Puppet with Nagios
I’ve been setting up a Puppet system at work so we can easily set up virtual servers, and also so that all the configuration is in one place.
Yesterday, someone suggested to me how I can have our existing Nagios system monitor the state of the puppet configuration. This allows me to be notified if there is something causing puppet to fail on any of the monitored nodes.
There is a Ruby script out there that is a Nagios plugin, however it requires extra Ruby libraries, and I don’t know how to handle them nicely on a Debian system. I do, however, know how to handle Perl libs. So I wrote a Perl plugin that does the same task. It’s got a lot of hard-coded paths and times and such, you’ll want to make completely sure that they work in your configuration. It’s also not well documented, but it is quite basic: check_puppet.pl
The main tricky dependency it has is on Nagios::Plugin, but it’s in CPAN, so some dh-make-perl should get you a Debian package for it easily.