PennState - Customer Case Study

Penn State needed a way to take metrics from Nagios, which they use to monitor nearly everything, and put it into a more useful system. Previously, they were using pnp4nagios, but it made it very difficult to find the data they were looking for, compare data from both of their nagios systems (active/passive pair), and combine the metrics with metrics from other systems. They looked at graphios originally, but found it didn't make efficient use of tags, and the data was laid out rather awkwardly. In the end, they wrote a custom Python script with better logging, simpler configuration, code that was easier to read, and used the influxdb-python module to talk to InfluxDB, obviating the need to handle any of that themselves. There is also a scripted dashboard for displaying all the metrics available for a given host. Eventually, the metrics collected with nagios+fluxios will be displayed alongside metrics from other systems, including Telegraf, which will likely replace their aging Ganglia installation.