Nagios3 + MK Livestatus + xinetd on Debian 6/Ubuntu

Preparation

First we need to make sure we have all the stuff we need to compile mk livestatus and run it

sudo apt-get install make build-essential xinetd ucspi-unix

MK Livestatus

Grab the mk livestatus source from here, currently it’s version 1.1.10p3 but update the commands below to match your version.

wget https://mathias-kettner.de/download/mk-livestatus-1.1.10p3.tar.gz
tar xvzf mk-livestatus-1.1.10p3.tar.gz
cd mk-livestatus-1.1.10p3
./configure
make
sudo make install

Xinetd

Now that it’s compiled we need to write a xinetd config for it, create a new file called /etc/xinetd.d/livestatus and put the following in it

service livestatus {
    type = UNLISTED
    port = 6557
    socket_type = stream
    protocol = tcp
    wait = no
    cps = 100 3
    instances = 500
    per_source = 250
    flags = NODELAY
    user = nagios
    server = /usr/bin/unixcat
    server_args = /var/lib/nagios3/rw/live
    only_from = 127.0.0.1 # modify this to only allow specific hosts to connect, currenly localhost only
    disable = no
}

Now we restart xinetd using

sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Nagios3

Now we need to open up /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg and add the following line

event_broker_options=-1 broker_module=/usr/local/lib/mk-livestatus/livestatus.o /var/lib/nagios3/rw/live

Now we need to restart Nagios

sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart

If you take a look in /var/log/nagios3/nagios.log

sudo tail -n 100 /var/log/nagios3/nagios.log

you should see something like below

[1318547328] livestatus: Livestatus 1.1.10p3 by Mathias Kettner. Socket: '/var/lib/nagios3/rw/live'
[1318547328] livestatus: Please visit us at https://mathias-kettner.de/
[1318547328] livestatus: Hint: please try out OMD - the Open Monitoring Distribution
[1318547328] livestatus: Please visit OMD at https://omdistro.org
[1318547328] Event broker module '/usr/local/lib/mk-livestatus/livestatus.o' initialized successfully.

Also, we can ls the newly created socket

ls -lah /var/lib/nagios3/rw/live

srw-rw---- 1 nagios www-data 0 2011-10-14 00:08 /var/lib/nagios3/rw/live

We can test is by creating a test file called host_query with the following content

GET hosts

And run the following command

sudo unixcat < host_query /var/lib/nagios3/rw/live

If all worked you should see output.