Nagios and Ruby

So as I mentioned in my post here, I've been working on a sort of Nagios toolbox in Ruby. I never really found anything at large about it and honestly, most people are doing stuff in shell scripts or with Perl.

I don't honestly blame them but I wanted a project to force me to learn Ruby better and I had a specific need. I could have this written already in Perl or even straight Bash but, again, I wanted to learn Ruby better.

As I said in my other post, here are the design goals starting out:

• Import existing configs (objects only. Not concerned about the operational parameters)
• Parse existing objects (apart from reading the configurations)
• Create objects (hosts,services,contacts, *groups, etc...)
• Write new configs
• Enforce/Support Templating

I'm not writing a new front end. I'm not writing a global configuration suite for Nagios. My goal is object management. Many of the defaults in nagios.cfg work OOB. However, any time I spend in #nagios, the MAJORITY of the questions are related to actually defining what to monitor and how to monitor it. The example included are pretty solid but they're VERY verbose to the point of being confusing. On the flip side, someone like me who can write a .cfg in his sleep, is still using vi to manage entries.

At my new company, they are BIG on automation. I mean EVERYTHING is automated from an SA perspective. The only exception comes with NEW environments. This is still a mishmash of manual processes and checklists with a slathering of the above automation. One of my first things I was tasked with when I walked through the door was to modernize the existing Nagios configuration. This project is part of that. I need to integrate anything I do seamlessly into the existing automation for it to be accepted as process.

So consider this a "declaration of intent to proceed" or somesuch politispeek. Feel free to comment on my lack of Ruby skill and where you think I can change things.

Here's the code I have so far:

http://dev.lusis.org/nagios/ruby/