A sneak peek at four new Nagios and Zabbix plugins for Windows Azure

Busy times at MS Open Tech! Today we’d like to share with the Azure community a sneak peek at our work on four new plugins for Nagios and Zabbix. It’s early days, but we care about your feedback and love working in the open, so effective today you can take a look at our github repo and see what we are working on to make monitoring on Azure easy and immediate for users of Nagios and Zabbix.

What you can play with today is:

  • A plugin for Windows Azure Storage, that will allow you to monitor ingress, egress, requests, success ratio, availability, latency, and more
  • A plugin for Windows Azure SQL Databases, that will allow you to monitor ingress, egress, requests, success ratio, availability, latency, etc
  • A plugin for Windows Azure Active directory, that will allow you to monitor changes in user and group information (userdelta, groupdelta)
  • A plugin for Windows Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)  Worker Roles, that will allow you to monitor cpu, memory, asp.net stats, web service stats, and other compute stats

Note that all compute plugins can be also used to monitor Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Virtual Machines

The steps for installing and running the plugins are documented in this ReadMe.

Nagios and Zabbix have established themselves as popular choices for lightweight enterprise-class IT and infrastructure monitoring and alerting. The vibrant open source community built around Nagios has contributed hundreds of plugins (most of which are also compatible  with Zabbix) to enable  developers, IT professionals and DevOps pros to monitor a variety of entities, from servers to databases to online services. We love to help our customers that know and use those tools, and we are committed to supporting monitoring on Azure using open source technologies.

This is a work in progress, and we’d love to hear from users to make our implementation of these popular tools the best it can be. The Plugins are available on our github repo, and we welcome your feedback and contributions. Send us a pull request if you’d like to contribute to these projects, or leave a comment/email if you have some feedback for us. See you on github!