How to relay Nagios information to a central location?

Question

I have Nagios running to monitor a number of various local services. I am trying to figure out a way to have Nagios monitor network connectivity between two remote locations and report that information back to my Nagios server to be included in my list of monitored services.

For example: Let's say my company has a VPN connection between our California office and our New York office. The New York office has a VPN connection with our Seattle office. I want to monitor the connection (something as simple as a ping at regular intervals) between the New York and Seattle office and have this information relayed back to the Nagios server at my California office so that I can view that information with the rest of my locally monitored services.

Thanks for your input!

Answer 1

What you're looking for is NSCA. On the central Nagios server you create all the hosts and services you want to monitor, but don't enable active checks. You also need to enable passive check results in the main Nagios configuration.

The "distributed" Nagios instances then need to use NSCA to submit service check results to the central host.

Answer 2

Have a look at http://www.smetj.net/wiki/Nscaweb

It basically does what nsca does, but it has some more features:

1. http(s) as transport makes it more friendly in a firewalled environment.
2. SSL encryption when desired.
3. Supports multiline plugin & performance output.
4. Accepts data coming over http or from local named pipes.
5. Submit data to many types of destinations: named pipes (nagios.cmd), NSCAweb, NRDP or a file.
6. Loadbalance and failover between multiple urls per destination.
7. Duplicate and forward passive check results to an "unlimited" amount of destinations.
8. Submit messages to 1 destination or all destinations depending on the url messages are to.
9. Simultaneous local and remote delivery.
10. Each destination has an independent, dedicated thread and queue.
11. Buffering of unavailable destinations and resubmitting when destination comes available to prevent data loss.
12. Builtin, multiuser authentication.
13. Trivial to submit check results using http post.
14. Submit check results in bulk or one by one.
15. Use curl as a client from the command line.

Cheers,

Jelle