Check plugin for Linux network interfaces -- recommendations?

Service Monitoring
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Hi all! :slight_smile:

For one (in my mind pretty standard) use case I cannot find a suitable check plugin:
Listing and checking the network interfaces on a Linux agent.

Kind of what you get with ifconfig or ip -s a.
Or IcingaForWindows’ Invoke-IcingaCheckNetworkInterface.
(Operational status, link speed, traffic, packet counts, discards, errors.)

How do you do it?

  • SNMP checks?
    – Sadly not an option in most of our network segments.

  • Plugins mentioned in the ITL? Something from either Icinga or Nagios exchanges?
    – Being pretty old for the most part, they don’t know about docker interfaces, or are still hardcoded for “ethX” in our times of “Predictable Network Interface Names” like enpXsX.

  • Something from linuxfabrik.ch?
    – Maybe I’m too dumb :crazy_face:, but I can’t find anything suitable (although for most other cases those guys have awesome plugins).

For the record, I’m currently using this:

Thanks for your ideas. :v:
– Barney

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You might take a look here and here.

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Thank you Roland!
I’ll update this thread once I’ve found something for my use case.

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We are using GitHub - Al2Klimov/check_linux_netdev. Advantage: its a Go-binary and you don’t have to fulfill any additional dependencies.

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if you can use SNMP, then check this out:
check_nwc_health (check_nwc_health - ConSol Labs)
(= giant perl-script)
I have setup ~1000 different network-hardware checks with this brilliant Schweizer-Taschemesser !

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As it turns out, Henning’s proposed check plugin was exactly what I was looking for.

check_linux_netdev…

  • simply cats the contents of /proc/net/dev on a Linux agent (plus some additional magic),
  • allows to exclude interfaces you don’t need monitored (like docker0)
  • and lets you set warn and crit thresholds for each individual metric of your interface, like rx:errs.

The author of the plugin also provides Icinga2 config examples (command, service template etc.).
Though you’re better off using those just as a guideline and instead manually adding object definitions in Director (circumventing potential issues with the Icinga DSL).

Here’s the link to plugin again:

… and here’s a big thank you :heart: to @henning, @rsx and @web-schneider for your invaluable help!

  • Barney
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