Nagios is loved and hated in the industry. Nagios has a great brand recognition, but suffers from less than intuitive setup and difficult to automate configuration. With passive checks and right Chef cookbooks, Nagios/Icinga setup becomes very effective. Another Nagios weakness is poor implementation. Fortunately, Nagios poorly implements right ideas, so not everything is lost. This war story is about fixing Nagios NSCA implementation. Nagios NSCA is a Nagios passive-check daemon written in C that runs on a Nagios server and processes all passive check sent by Nagios clients.
Starting to use Chef is easy. Realizing the full power of Chef is not quite as easy. Many Chef cookbooks that I looked at can be significantly improved. Cookbooks created by developers can be improved by using systems engineering patterns. Cookbooks created by system administrators can be improved by using software engineering patterns. Opscode does a very good job describing building blocks of Chef cookbooks. Explaining how to write good Chef cooks is something I have not seen done yet. In this post I will go over my cookbook writing process using a syslog-ng cookbook as an example.
