Polling CFEngine with Opennms

In the coming months I'm going to work with and write about Opennms. Started in 1999, Opennms is a mature, open source, enterprise scale monitoring system.

In this first installment I offer you a way to monitor CFEngine's cf-serverd on any host. Since cf-agent typically promises that cf-serverd running, knowing that cf-serverd is running tells you that the agent is working.

In my install, Opennms keeps most of its configuration files in /etc/opennms. First edit capsd-configuration.xml, adding the following section.

<protocol-plugin protocol="Cfengine" class-name="org.opennms.netmgt.capsd.plugins.TcpPlugin" scan="on">
   <property key="port" value="5308" />
   <property key="timeout" value="2000" />
   <property key="retry" value="1" />
</protocol-plugin>

Second, edit poller-configuration.xml adding these sections.

<service name="Cfengine" interval="300000" user-defined="false" status="on">
   <parameter key="retry" value="2" />
   <parameter key="timeout" value="3000" />
   <parameter key="port" value="5308"/>
   <parameter key="rrd-repository" value="/opt/opennms/share/rrd/response" />
   <parameter key="rrd-base-name" value="cfengine" />
   <parameter key="ds-name" value="cfengine" />
</service>

<monitor service="Cfengine" class-name="org.opennms.netmgt.poller.monitors.TcpMonitor" />

Restart Opennms, then you can manually rescan hosts immediately, or wait for Opennms to do so in it's own time, usually overnight.

Sharp viewers will notice that my node is an IPv6 node. Opennms supports IPv6, an important considering in the coming years.