Reading status from a Unix socket with MK Livestatus

The NDOUtils event broker and database system is a useful way of getting data out of the Nagios Core program and its history in order to generate our own reports and displays but it has a few flaws; the MySQL database setup can be complicated and a hassle to maintain, and the database can grow quite large, which makes searching slow and uses a lot of system resources not just for data searching, but for the housekeeping it does in removing old entries.

The MK Livestatus tool, part of Mathias Kettner's Check_MK suite of Nagios Core monitoring tools, provides a way of retrieving data directly from the running Nagios process by writing queries to a Unix socket and by reading results back from it, without requiring a database to do so. Provided our queries do not need to be too sophisticated, this extension can make things a lot faster and less burdensome on system resources, which is why a growing number of administrators and Nagios...