In this installment of the “Meet The Community” series I interview Joerg Linge, author of pnp4nagios – a popular performance data processing and graphing addon for Nagios.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
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A. I am one of four Unix system administrators (engineers) at a large regional newspaper publishing company. I worked on Linux for the last ten years.
In 2005, I have specialized myself on the use of Nagios. In my very sparse freetime I enjoy motor cycling and use the machine to commute to work.
Q. Can you give us an overview of what your project (pnp4nagios) is?
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A. PNP4Nagios (PNP) serves to process the performance data, prepared by the Nagios plugins. RRDTool is used for data visualization and storage.
Q. What are the primary advantages for a Nagios user to begin using pnp4nagios?
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A. It’s very easy to install PNP and the requirements of maintenance work are minimal. In my opinion, trend graphs are one of the most important indicators to analyze problems.
A reliable alarm system like Nagios, paired with PNP, is a great assistance to get to the root of any problem.
Q. There are several graphing/trending addons available for Nagios. What inspired you to start work on pnp4nagios, and what are its advantages over other options?
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A. The initial version was introduced in 2005, after the first german Nagios workshop. At this time, there were only a few similar Add-ons. The most popular of these was PerfParse. Though I didn’t like to manage data in MySQL databases and so I decided to publish my already existing scripts under www.nagios-portal.org. The synonym PNP (PNP is not PerfParse) emerged from this workshop.
Q. In your experience, do users require additional graphing/trending capabilities that are not already provided by pnp4nagios? For example, do they also use tools like Cacti?
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A. Yes, I believe so. PNP is designed for the limited purpose to create trend graphs for Nagios. This is sufficient from the sysadmin’s point of view. However, managers require more exact methods of analysis. For example, easy comparison of several different rows of data. Cacti is a very good tool for data not contained in Nagios, and the zoom function of Cacti has been integrated into PNP. The developers of Cacti have done a really good Job.
Q. There are hundreds of community-contributed plugins out there. Are there plans to build a more extensive library or database of graphing templates to support nice layouts for these?
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A. At first, all of these plugins need to show valid performance data. Sadly, too often are very little values attached to the developer guidelines, although a quite simple matter.
Of course I can visualize an area at exchange.nagios.org, where plugins are listed for which PNP templates already exists. I am alway happy to find plugins which offer appropriate templates, as in case of check_oracle_health, check_multi and check_mk. A template library is not planned for now.
Q. How long have you been working on pnp4nagios?
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A. Since 2005. The project has developed strongly according to the needs of the users. I work diligently on PNP whenever time allows.
Q. You are the original author of pnp4nagios. Are there other active developers or contributors to the project?
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A. Yes, thats right. But over time, many people have contributed to the development, and at this point I offer my gratefully thanks to them.
Hendrik Baecker and Wolfgang Nieder share work on the project. Hendrik is responsible for the parts written in C, Wolfgang takes care of the documentation and works untiringly on the mailing lists and on www.nagios-portal.org. Sven Velt looks after the Debain packages and Carlos de Nova the Spanish translation.
Q. How did you first come to know about Nagios and why did you decide to begin using it?
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A. Its a long time ago. In 2003 we were using a commercial monitoring tool, and I was in charge of monitoring the SAP systems. However, the SAP agents of this tool never worked properly, so I installed Nagios and the SAP CCMS plugins. One year later, Nagios replaced the commercial tool. Since this time Nagios has played a central role in our organization.
Q. What do you see as being the most advantageous reasons for using Nagios?
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A. Flexibility. Nagios is made for sysadmins. A good friend of mine said “Nagios can do everything you can do” and he was right.
Without Unix experience, the initial steps in Nagios are certainly not easy, but in the hands of an experienced sysadmin, Nagios is indeed a very powerful tool.
Q. Are there specific changes to Nagios that you’d like to see made in order to make pnp4nagios integration simpler?
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A. Nagios allows plenty of headroom for integrating PNP. It would be advantageous to expand Nagios to facilitate the inclusion of sub configuration files, as in the Apache Web server.
This would simplify the task of including the appropriate config for packet maintainers. I would like to see automatic links to PNP in the future Webinterface without the need to define a notes or action URL.
Q. Are there any resources that you require in order to continue working on or improve the project?
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A. I need more time! Developers, testers and translators are very welcome to assist. Simply register on the pnp4nagios-devel mailing lists, or send a direct mail to support@pnp4nagios.org
Q. What can the Nagios Community do to help improve pnp4nagios?
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A. Respect the developer guidelines and write good plugins. Share your work on exchange.nagios.org and help each other on the mailing lists. Thats the way to keep a working community up and running.
I would be grateful to receive picture postcards if PNP pleases, and await them with interest to see in which countries PNP finds usage. My address on http://www.pnp4nagios.org/kontakt
Q. What does the future hold for pnp4nagios? What are your plans for it?
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A.
PNP has a few limitations which we wish to eradicate. RRD databases are static, and therefor cannot update if the number of rows of data has changed.
The structure of databases cannot be changed at runtime. In future PNP will utilize separate RRD databases for each set of data. We are also developing the next version, the 0.6.x branch, under the PHP framework Kohana, also used by op5’s Ninja Project.
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