nagifo 0.2.0

Nagios notifications through notifo

Version:

0.2.0

Introduction

Nagifo is a simple little package to send nagios alerts to your mobile phone via Notifo, and to allow you to acknowledge nagios alerts without having to login to nagios.

Installation

You can install nagifo off the cheeseshop using pip or easy_install, or you can install from source.

To install using easy_install,:

$ easy_install nagifo

To install using pip,:

$ pip install nagifo

If you’ve downloaded the source tarball off the cheeseshop, or cloned the nagifo repository, you can install nagifo like so:

$ python2 setup.py install

Configuration

Notifo

Any further configuration requires a Notifo account, so go sign up if you haven’t already (accounts are free). You will also require your Notifo API key. You can find your personal API key on the Notifo user settings page.

Since the entire point of this (at least for me) is to get alerts on a mobile phone, you’ll probably also want to install the Notifo client on your phone.

Note, everybody in your organization who wants notifications via Notifo will require their own Notifo account.

Nagios Configuration

Setting up nagios to use nagifo to send notifications is as simple as I could figure out how to make it.

You will require a command definition, which is what actually runs the nagifo command (make sure nagifo is in your $PATH!). These are commonly located in commands.cfg. Here is the command definition to use:

define command{
        command_name    notify-by-notifo
        command_line    nagifo \
          "$CONTACTADDRESS1$" "$CONTACTADDRESS2$" "$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$" "$HOSTNAME$" \
          "$SERVICESTATE$" "$SERVICEDESC$" "$SERVICEOUTPUT$ $LONGDATETIME$"
        }

To get Nagios to send you an alert over Notifo, you need to tell Nagios to run the notify-by-notifo command when sending an alert to you. This is done by adding the following line to your contact definition:

service_notification_commands   +notify-by-notifo

And since the nagifo script requires the username and API key of the user that it will be alerting, these are also required in the contact definition. As I have no idea if Nagios supports arbitrary fields in a contact definition, I’ve used the address1 field for the notifo username, and the address2 field for the notifo API key.:

address1                        <notifo-username>
address2                        <notifo-API-key>

Here’s what an example of what a complete contact definition looks like:

define contact{
        contact_name                    jdoe
        use                             generic-contact
        alias                           John Doe
        email                           [e-mail]
        address1                        jdoe
        address2                        lkjsdf908234234kjndflkjsdf2342345439sdfsdf3
        service_notification_commands   +notify-by-notifo
        }

Acknowledging from Notifo

Included with this package is a little webapp that will allow you to acknowledge alerts from your phone, without needing to log in to nagios. Configuration of this webapp is admittedly more involved.

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to assume you’re using apache2 to serve nagios, and have mod_wsgi installed and already loaded. That said, the quickest way of getting the webapp working is to add the following to the apache2 configuration file:

WSGIScriptAliasMatch /nagifo /var/www/nagifo.wsgi

The contents of /var/www/nagifo.wsgi are simply:

from nagifo.nagacknowledge import app as application

If your setup differs from my assumptions, or more details are required, take a look at the Flask deployment guide.

The final thing required is the nagifo configuration file. The nagifo config file is located at /etc/nagifo.conf, and looks like:

[default]
nagios_cmdfile = /usr/local/nagios/var/rw/nagios.cmd
secret_key = some_long_random_string22
external_url = nottaken.net:4444/nagifo

You’ll need to find where your nagios install puts its nagios.cmd file, and set nagios_cmdfile to the path of that file.

The secret_key should be some long random string. The purpose of the string is to act like a password and prevent random strangers from acknowledging your alerts by simply guessing at the url.

The external_url setting should be the publicly-accessible hostname of the server nagios is running on, the port (if required), and the path the wsgi script is running on. Since in the apache configuration example I direct the request to nagifo only if the URI starts with /nagifo, the external_url must include /nagifo.