History

Nagrestconf started life around 2010 in Nokia's Advanced Operations. It was a critical part of a larger system named Shared Nagios that had a number of goals: To provide a single viewing console in their Network Operations Centre (NOC) to show the status of all servers in all data centres in all countries; To remove the bottleneck of one department handling nagios configuration by decentralising the configuration, delegating to other nagios administrators, but maintaining a shared nagios cluster for all to use; And finally to allow automation so that load balancers, controlling a large collection of blade servers, could enable or disable monitoring for servers as they were brought up, or taken down, depending on load. At this point Nagrestconf was just the REST API, which, after much discussion took about two weeks to write.

Choices were made at this stage on preferred programming languages and architecture. For the REST interface, PHP and Shell scripts were chosen as it was more likely that existing administrators could fix code written in these languages. Additionally, for the programming features that were actually required, shell scripts were the easiest option. The csv file format was also chosen so that administrators could edit those files directly if something broke, and it was a requirement that any task could be completed from the command line.

Development on Nagrestconf continued as the author moved to other companies that required these features and their business requirements directed further development efforts. With source size currently standing at about 30,000 lines of code, it's not surprising that Nagrestconf has become a good base to build upon to create customised monitoring solutions.

A few large companies have contributed developer time to Nagrestconf including: Nokia, the BBC Archive, United Health, and Irdeto, so their own unique requirements are now built into it, but the main driving force behind all development is - to keep things simple!