The open-source centreon-plugins library constantly grows and evolves! Since the last Plugin Pack release, we merged not less than 45 new pull requests and got closer to one hundred unique code contributors!
If you want to be sure you didn't miss anything, click on this link to see what's behind all these contributions!
I picked some of these and will try to highlight them by getting more into the details in this article.
(Agent-less) Windows Monitoring
Last month, we released a new way to check Windows servers and desktops, and it's agent-less! It relies on WSMan, more precisely, the WinRM implementation Microsoft made of this standard.
Using HTTPS to check those servers make your life easier at firewall and network policy levels. You can check all already supported checks and metrics here.
It's still a work in progress, and we need to hear your feedback to improve and extend it! We built a tutorial to help you go through the main configuration steps.
In the meantime, you can still use the latest centreon_plugins.exe binary and the venerable NSClient++ agent to monitor your Windows apps!
AWS Monitoring
Something that will soon reflect in AWS Monitoring Packs, you can choose to assume the role of your Poller. That means you don't have to work with access and secret keys anymore and care about their rotation. The only prerequisite is that your Poller runs on AWS and has the required privileges.
HTTP Backends
The new way to expose metrics is APIs. It implies that we have a robust and user-friendly way to perform HTTP requests within plugins. Last year, we introduced a new backend 'curl' to make troubleshooting and testing easier for our users. We now go one step further by making it the default for all new HTTP-based plugins!
Indeed we need you! If you have experienced difficulties using some HTTP plugins using the LWP library, just let us know, and we'll make curl the default one!
Security
You can now encrypt the content of the cache file using a key. It reduces the risk of someone playing man-in-the-middle by stealing tokens the plugins may cache on disk to improve check performances and reduce their footprint on remote APIs.
Of course, it implies access to the server, and somebody competent could try to find this encrypted key with a ps command. Bad news for them, we make the password-manager options available in all our plugins as requested here. Whatever the sensitive credentials you use in your monitoring checks or for cache file encryption, you can now choose to protect them by using hard to access environment variable or any other supported password manager like KeePass or HashiCorp vault.
Centreon Plugins needs you!
Let us know what you think about these highlights!
If you've missed it, you have a dedicated section in your favourite community platform to ask for new development and see if it makes the community buzz.
If your request obtains more than ten votes, we will automatically add your plugin request to our next sprint.
Cheers,