Firebird Nagios plugin check_firebird.py

At work we use a lot of Firebird databases, and so far our system admins checked the availability of a Firebird Database by simply trying to connect via telnet to the port 3050 and see if they would get a response. With this kind of check you can't really determine if the database is really up and running, let's just say for instance if in your aliases.conf (the file in firebird which holds an alias which then points to the database filename), you have an alias which points to a database file that doesn't exist anymore, you would still get a response from the Firebird Server via telnet but if you would try to connect to the that specific database you would get an error. We 've also tried fbexport which relies on a library called ipbb which we couldn't get to compile. Therefore they asked me if I could write a plugin for nagios which would do a real check to ensure that the Databases are up and running, here is my result.

I chose to write the plugin in python, due it's simplicity, and because I already wrote some script using the python-kinterbasdb extension. The script requires a few parameters like hostname, databasealias, username, password and optionally you can specify a different port. For the actual check I simply do an SQL Query onto the Database, which gives me a list of tables which hold relations between each other. I thought this would be a good enough check, but if you have a better idea let me know about it. Let's get to actual source code, we are still testing the plugin, and I am going to post it onto http://exchange.nagios.org/.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# Firebird Nagios plugin
#
# A plugin for Nagios which checks the firebird
# connection to a specific host by connecting
# to it and executing an SQL Statement which should
# return all relations between the tables which
# are in the database, be aware if you have an
# empty database without any tables you will get
# a critical error.
#
# Based on a template from
# http://bsd.dischaos.com/2009/04/29/nagios-plugin-template-in-python/
#
# Requirements :
#    python-kinterbasdb
#
# Example :
#    check_firebird.py -h 192.168.1.1 -a employee -u sysdba -p masterkey -d 3050
__author__  = 'Frank Lazzarini'
__contact__ = 'flazzarini at gmail.com'
__version__ = '0.3.6'
__license__ = 'GPLv3'

try:
    import kinterbasdb
except ImportError, _:
    pass

import sys, getopt, socket


nagios_codes = {'OK': 0, 'WARNING': 1, 'CRITICAL': 2, 'UNKNOWN': 3, 'DEPENDENT': 4}


def usage():
    # Returns the nagios status UNKOWN with a usage description
    nagios_return('UNKNOWN', 'usage: {0} -h  -a  -u  -p  -d  -a " must be given as a parameter otherwise
    # the script will print the usage description using nagios_return()
    # function, else parse/verify the parameters
    if len(sys.argv) < 8:
        usage()

    try:
        opts , args = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], 'h:a:u:p:d:', ['host=', 'pass=', 'alias=', 'user=', 'password=', 'destport='])
    except getopt.GetoptError, err:
        usage()

    # If destport is not given an argument assume
    # default Firebird Port 3050
    if not ('-d', '--destport') in opts:
        destport = '3050'

    # Run through the opts and get the parameters
    for o, value in opts:
        if o in ('-h', '--host'):
            if not is_valid_ipv4_address(value):
                nagios_return('UNKNOWN', value + ' is not a valid ipv4 address.'.format(sys.argv[0]))
            else :
                host = value
        elif o in ('-a', '--alias'):
            dbalias = value
        elif o in ('-u', '--user'):
            username = value
        elif o in ('-p', '--pass'):
            password = value
        elif o in ('-d', '--destport'):
            destport = value
        else:
            usage()

    result = check_condition(host, destport, dbalias, username, password)
    nagios_return(result['code'], result['message'])

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Download link : check_firebird.py-0.3.6.tar

If you happen to be on ubuntu simply apt-get python-kinterbasdb and put the python script into /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/ and make it executable. After that you have to tell nagios that there is a new command that nagios can use, therefore create a new file in /etc/nagios-plugins/config call it firebird.cfg and put the following in it.

define command{
        command_name    check_firebird
        command_line    /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_firebird.py -h '$HOSTADDRESS$' -a '$ARG1$' -u '$ARG2$' -p '$ARG3$' -d '$ARG4$'
}

After that you configure the Host plus its service in /etc/nagios3/conf.d/host.cfg.

define host {
        use    generic-host
        host_name    fb21
        alias    fb21
        address    10.90.91.21
        }


define service {
        use    generic-service
        host_name    fb21
        service_description    FIREBIRD-test
        check_command    check_firebird!test!sysdba!masterkey
        ;Optional you could put !3051 for a different port
        }

Hope this was helpful :)