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I am curious why configuration compatibility is a selling point, for you in particular. Is there some popular inventory management tool out there that has been

I am curious why configuration compatibility is a selling point, for you in particular. Is there some popular inventory management tool out there that has been cranking out Nagios configuration files?

tapoxi 11y ago
I've been using NConf (http://www.nconf.org/ http://www.nconf.org/) to manage a Nagios installation. We migrated over to Icinga 1.x without much trouble. Our existing config still worked, NConf still worked, plugins still worked.
- dvanduzer 11y ago
  I've been unimpressed with NConf. It's useful for what it is; I even use phpMyAdmin occasionally. Shinken sounds interesting, but I'd never heard of it. What I'm trying to understand is why anyone would have so much invested in their Nagios configuration syntax. If you have more than a few dozen hosts, you are probably already using a higher level configuration abstraction. NConf, for example. But once you stop counting servers by the dozens, you are hopefully using an even higher level configuration abstraction for data center management. In which case you either already committed to a Big Vendor years ago, or you'd have no incentive to switch away from a legacy Nagios deployment. Anyone who needs to replace a Nagios deployment and prioritizes configuration file level compatibility in their new monitoring platform sounds crazy to me. (edit: plugin compatibility is all that anyone should care about, and even that's just based on good decisions about uniform output)
  - beagle3 11y ago
    I am the guy who mentioned shinken[0]. I totally agree, and as I mentioned, configuration compatibility was NOT a selling point at all - I just mentioned it as a property of shinken that makes it (supposedly) a drop-in nagios replacement without even the need to reconfigure. I see that as a selling point for testing (not relevant to me because I didn't have a previous nagios installation) - to test shinken for real, you just install it (a couple of apt-gets) and run it - you don't need to configure it. Once you've actually decided to commit to a new system, configuration compatibility with your old system is much less important, of course (provided it's not a tangled mess of 1000 hand edited files) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinken_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinken_%28software%29
    - dvanduzer 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure everyone cares about plugin compatibility, and a few people are impressed by the finesse involved in bringing configuration compatibility. Your point about the ease of compatibility testing is quite salient.
beagle3 11y ago
It wasn't a selling point for me. I was just pointing it out.

tapoxi 11y ago

I've been using NConf (http://www.nconf.org/ http://www.nconf.org/) to manage a Nagios installation. We migrated over to Icinga 1.x without much trouble. Our existing config still worked, NConf still worked, plugins still worked.

dvanduzer 11y ago
I've been unimpressed with NConf. It's useful for what it is; I even use phpMyAdmin occasionally. Shinken sounds interesting, but I'd never heard of it. What I'm trying to understand is why anyone would have so much invested in their Nagios configuration syntax. If you have more than a few dozen hosts, you are probably already using a higher level configuration abstraction. NConf, for example. But once you stop counting servers by the dozens, you are hopefully using an even higher level configuration abstraction for data center management. In which case you either already committed to a Big Vendor years ago, or you'd have no incentive to switch away from a legacy Nagios deployment. Anyone who needs to replace a Nagios deployment and prioritizes configuration file level compatibility in their new monitoring platform sounds crazy to me. (edit: plugin compatibility is all that anyone should care about, and even that's just based on good decisions about uniform output)
- beagle3 11y ago
  I am the guy who mentioned shinken[0]. I totally agree, and as I mentioned, configuration compatibility was NOT a selling point at all - I just mentioned it as a property of shinken that makes it (supposedly) a drop-in nagios replacement without even the need to reconfigure. I see that as a selling point for testing (not relevant to me because I didn't have a previous nagios installation) - to test shinken for real, you just install it (a couple of apt-gets) and run it - you don't need to configure it. Once you've actually decided to commit to a new system, configuration compatibility with your old system is much less important, of course (provided it's not a tangled mess of 1000 hand edited files) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinken_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinken_%28software%29
  - dvanduzer 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure everyone cares about plugin compatibility, and a few people are impressed by the finesse involved in bringing configuration compatibility. Your point about the ease of compatibility testing is quite salient.

beagle3 11y ago

It wasn't a selling point for me. I was just pointing it out.