In this post, we demonstrate how to monitor the status of an elasticsearch cluster using Nagios on Ubuntu 14.04.

Nagios server setup

We assume that a nagios server has been configured on the address nagios.your_host_name.com as described in the following guide:

Installing Nagios on Ubuntu

Install the elasticsearch plugin

First, download the Elasticsearch plugin into /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/ directory (into your Nagios server nagios.your_host_name.com). You should also see all other plugins in the /plugins directory.

Second, define a check_elasticsearch command by appending the following lines in the file /etc/nagios3/command.cfg

# check_elasticsearch command definition
define command{
       command_name check_elasticsearch
       command_line /usr/bin/perl /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_elasticsearch -H $HOSTADDRESS$
}

Third, add the following service definition in the host that you want to check if Elasticsearch is running. In our case we will use the host es1.example.com.

# Define a service to check the state of the elasticsearch node
define service{
       use                  generic-service
       host_name            es1.example.com
       service_description  Elasticsearch
       check_command        check_elasticsearch
}

Finally, restart nagios using

sudo service nagios3 restart

Wait 5 minutes and then check Nagios’s web interface, i.e., browse to http://nagios.your_host_name.com/nagios3/.

Related posts

See also Tomcat using Nagios