Posts for the month of January 2012

Gong Xi Fa Cái

Since I forgot xmas and new years eve (was ill) I figured I'd post the Chinese new year instead! :)

  • Posted: 2012-01-22 19:24
  • Categories: ot
  • Comments (0)

NSClient++ 0.4.0 RC1! (Finally)

build 126, 127 will be out later tonight whith some fixes to NSCA unit-tests.

After years of vapor ware and many broken promises I can finally proudly pressent the first release candidate of NSCLient++ 0.4.0!

So what can you expect you ask? Quite a lot in fact but currently the rather sad answer will be unfortunetly "not much". Now this is a good thing and the reason is that the idea is that anyone runnign on a previous version of NSCLient++ should be able to just upgrade and not notice the difference (except for the odd bug fix here and there).

But for all the rest of you who do not want to "just upgrade" there is a massive amount of new features. The two biggest changes will undoubtedly be the linux support as well as is a shift from beeing a "NRPE client" to more of a monitoring gateway which supports more protocols (with even more in the pipe). Another other major change is ofcourse the embedded python interpreter and the very extensive python API making it possible to create plugins in python which can have state across your monitoring.

So now it is just for everyone to go out test it and let me know what is not working so we can release a bug free version in the near future. I have not set a date as I am relaying on the community (yes, that is you!) for doing much of the test work and that may or may not take a lot of time (depending on how much YOU! test).

Stability and quality wise I hope it is farily stable and everything works as-is but one never knows when there is such a massive update. Especially as it is apretty free-form application which has a lot of the edge cases. But another major improvment is that there are now unit-tests which test various parts of the application at the time of writing there is around 1000 unit tests which more to come.

Many new protocols

We now support a number of new protocols (as well as old).

Currently supported:

  • NRPE
  • NSCA
  • "check_nt"
  • SysLog?
  • SMTP
  • NSCP (early concept version, both as distributed (think gearman) and non distributed (think NSCA/NRPE))

In the works:

  • http (rest)
  • Graphite
  • check_mk
  • NRDP
  • SNMP
  • WMI
  • "native remote windows checks"

Brand new API

Major new API changes which allows a lot more flexibility as well as extensible from modules and scripts.

Currently supported:

  • Python
  • plugins
  • Lua (old API currently)

In the works:

  • Lua
  • .Net

Brand new settings sub systems

Brand new flexible settings sub systems which supports many new formats as well as generation and including cross formats.

Currently supported:

  • ini-files
  • registry
  • http (ini files)
  • old
  • dummy (in memory store)

In the works:

  • XML
  • improved http

Other fixes and enhancments

We have of course a myrriad of bug fixes enhancments and and such here are a few highlights.

highlights:

  • Brand new (easy to use?) command line interface
  • Linux suppport (as mentioned previously)
  • CheckProcState: Enchancements
  • CheckEventLog: Real time checking
  • CheckWMI: Remote check support (rather crude currently)
  • lots of other things but focus is mainly on internals so checks are mainly the same

So! Test away, and hit me with your bugs, defects, problems, and issues... Michael Medin

Migration and concepts guide for 0.4.0

Hello google bot!

Just a quick heads up that the first draft of the migration guide as well as the concepts guide is now live!

Now I am off to make some last minute changes before releasing RC1!

Michael Medin

Documentation for 0.4.x

I have started to write documentation for the 0.4.x version. Currently we have the following documents:

Next up is a migration guide as well as a concept document. RC1 is still scheduled for this weekend so please help out next week to do some testing!

Note that all documents are "first draft" so it is a bit all over the place currently :P

Michael Medin

Status

Well, I sort of promised to release rc1 of 0.4.0 on which has now become last year. This was in fact almost about to happen but unfortunately I grew ill shortly after xmas (nothing serious really). But this has keep me away from the computer for about 2 weeks now meaning I am slightly behind. And what is worse I missed the golden "holiday opportunity" to do some serious documentation.

Now it is not too bad I finished the NRPE unit test last night and hopefully I will get some spare time during night this week to document the initial usage of 0.4.0 so with luck next week we will in fact see the first RC of 0.4.0!

Michael Medin