{"id":1047,"date":"2020-05-17T23:44:04","date_gmt":"2020-05-17T21:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mythryll.com\/?p=1047"},"modified":"2020-05-21T17:11:26","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T15:11:26","slug":"ansible-plugins-for-nagios-installation-on-ubuntu-18-04-4-lts-20-04-lts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mythryll.com\/?p=1047","title":{"rendered":"Ansible playbooks for Nagios Installation on Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS \/ 20.04 LTS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Hello all, this is @mythryll<\/a> , I hope everyone is staying safe! This is going to be a long one, so strap in and enjoy the ride (hopefully)!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A little back story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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A few years back I had started a conversation<\/a> with the great Michael Friedrich<\/a> who was at the time working at Icinga (I think), about how that product seemed better organized and structured than Nagios and that it lacked generally available guides on how to reach a practical real-world installation that could get more people involved and help the community grow. Michael complained (rightfully) that they were very deeply involved with developing the product and didn’t have time for guides (of course that’s not a job for the developers, I would say it’s the marketing’s job to push for the product to become accepted), so he challenged me to produce any automation stuff I could about Nagios first. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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https:\/\/icinga.com\/<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As it happens, I didn’t have time for that either, but I did manage to produce an Ansible playbook for upgrading Nagios and posted it here<\/a> . That became the first in a series of posts about Automation and the reason to clean up my act in my blog here, so it can be a little more presentable and perhaps even helpful to others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it happens, I was very much involved with projects and learning about network automation that I didn’t find the time to create an Ansible playbook for a clean Nagios Installation, as the necessary immersion in the Nagios development context seemed like a luxury. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am now at the point where I am working on an important project, combining tools from different worlds, so I need a way to reproduce a Nagios installation quickly, in a standard and documented way and without the risk of human error. So naturally I dug up my Ansible war axe and starting hacking at the problem..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what did you find?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I have found an older playbook about some of this here<\/a> by Sahil -Sharma. I did change a lot of things and adapted some others. Anyway it was very useful as an example but it only depicts the installation process mentioned in the docs, as does mine of course, so nothing too fancy here. Feel free to use that with the Nagios versions that referenced however, as a lot of things no longer work that way (you will get failures with the current versions). Sahil’s work includes a role where a main.yml file invokes all the other ones. I assume you can follow the same path and do one for yourself. I didn’t really want to go that far. I am not claiming to be an Ansible expert (far from it) and some of the plugins do not satisfy a major Ansible advantage: itempotency. So be careful and use snapshots if using VMs for your infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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https:\/\/github.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I have tested the playbooks I will include below both with Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. My initial target was to go with 20.04 all the way so that I can maintain the new car smell as much as possible.. Perl and Python and almost Ansible too foiled my plans at a few points. Here is what the installation includes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n