Migrating from Nagios

While Nagios and Centreon Engine are mostly compatible (they share the same configuration file format, internal logic, …) some slight differences occur.

Bug Report and Feature Request

Centreon Engine is based Nagios, which has shown over the years its extreme robustness. However as any other piece of software Centreon Engine might from time to time suffer from bugs. In those hopefully rare cases, Merethis would be glad to receive bug reports from users which are necessary for fast bug resolution.

Merethis also welcomes feature requests and code patches. Do not hesitate to write to us !

Privilege Drop

With Nagios, a user had to define a nagios_user variable and a nagios_group variable in the main configuration file. These variables were used by the program itself to drop privileges when the process was started. Centreon Engine delegates this feature to the system administrator. However he is not left alone, as Centreon Engine provide some startup scripts for various platforms (please refer to Running Centreon Engine section for more information). User and group used by the init script can be configured when compiling Centreon Engine as explained in the Compiling Centreon Engine section.

Daemonization

Nagios provides a -d flag that allows process to daemonize and run in background. In Centreon Engine, this feature must be provided by the user which runs Centreon Engine. However, init scripts handle the daemonization of Centreon Engine on supported platforms.

As a result, the daemon_dumps_core variable is no longer supported. If a user wish to coredump Centreon Engine, it has to be done as per his operating system’s manual.

Command Execution

When executing commands, Nagios used to feed them to a shell for command-line like parsing. This feature does not seem to be used a lot and add an extra load on supervision servers that do not rely on it. As a consequence, the shell execution has been removed from the execution sequence. Users that wish to restore previous behavior must write a shell script that will call their original command. They will then replace the command in Centreon Engine with the shell script.