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Database Monitoring with Nagios

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Compatible With
  • Nagios 3.x
  • Nagios 4.x
Owner
frank4dd
Website
nagios.fm4dd.com/howto/db-monitoring.htm
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Database Monitoring with Nagios
Database Monitoring with Nagios is a article with links to a collection of database monitoring plugins and descriptions of monitoring methods.
Many modern business software applications use a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) as their backend data store. Relational databases are optimized fast transactional operations and they allow to build comprehensive data views by querying organised data (data-warehouse). With these databases and their stored data being at the "heart" of applications, database "health" is critical. Typically, IT organisations have dedicated staff, DBA's, to look after them. To relieve them of routine tasks and improve on issue escalation and resolution, automated database monitoring with a tool like Nagios is a good idea. The linked article describes several ways of monitoring databases through Nagios, and links to several database plugins.
Reviews (1)
This howto is unusable for todays needs
byspicy_suresh, October 9, 2010
Sorry, using check_tcp for database monitoring??? Maybe this was state of the art in the 90's.
And even more weird...java-plugins. Did the author ever see an installation with more than 1 database? Imagine you have hundreds of databases to monitor or a few sap databases with 200 tablespaces each. Can you even imagine what happens if you fire up a java-plugin for every tablespace in 5-minute intervals?
And what about reading the nagios plugin devloper guidelines? performance data? command line arguments?
If you want to monitor databases seriously then check_oracle_health and it's cousins are the way to go.
Owner's reply

Dear Suresh,

Thank you for your comment.

Yes, the mentioned Java plugins do not scale to well when monitoring hundreds of DB's, as you point out. In some scenarios however, say in a medium size environment with 50+ databases, but all from a different vendor: DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL, MySQL, Postgres and Sybase, they are helpful to get a *basic* DB monitoring up and running.

Trying to monitor such a varied DB environment with a single Nagios instance AND using plugins with native DB client installations can quickly overwhelm Nagios admins. Not to mention that monitoring MS-SQL DB's with a native driver on Linux is extremly hard. Java DB drivers and plugins on the other hand are commonly available for all but the most exotic DB's, fairly easy to deploy, and provide simple and standardized way to monitor the most critical data in such a DB Zoo.

Some are actually searching for such a specific solution and are glad to find there is A) the option to use Java, and B) there is already a example plugin they can build upon and extend. Experts running large-scale, enterprise DB farms are usually at a level to write and adapt plugins whithout any help. ;-)