phpbb-nagios

A nagios phpBB extension for forum health monitoring.

Main aims

This extension helps to monitor a production phpBB forum, reporting its health.

What is being checked?

The most basic check is done by serving any valid 200 response. It means that web server is working. Additionally, the nagios phpBB extension:

• checks and serves the version of phpBB, if the phpBB version is not up to date, the extension sends a WARNING with a short explanation,
• checks if the forum is ON, if not, the extension serves a WARNING with a short explanation,
• for statistical purposes, the extension provides an amount of currently registered users and other useful statistical data, which can be stored by your nagios instance.

What precisely do I get from this extension?

If your forum is fine, the extension simply serves you a web page consisting of one line:

OK. Board is enabled. phpBB version 3.1.3 is up to date. 45993 from 67887 registered users activated their accounts. Topics: 8473. Posts: 299845. Files: 7634.

If something is wrong, it servers a line like that:

WARNING. phpBB forum is ON. The current 3.1.2 version is NOT up to date. 45993 from 67887 registered users activated their accounts. Topics: 8473. Posts: 299845. Files: 7634.

How do I connect nagios/icinga to this information?

For all monitoring I am personally using passive checks only. These are scripts I am running from cron every five minutes via nsca:

check-phpbb.sh

#!/bin/bash
curl -s https://yoursite.com/phpBB/nagios | html2text -width 800 | tail -n +2

send-phpbb.sh

#!/bin/bash
HOST='server'
SERVICE='phpbb'
COMMAND=check-phpbb.sh
WRAPPER=/opt/nsca_wrapper
SENDNSCA=/usr/sbin/send_nsca

$WRAPPER -H $HOST -S $SERVICE -C "$COMMAND" -b $SENDNSCA

Nagios server config files look like that:

define service {
	hostgroup_name			www-servers
	service_description		phpbb
	active_checks_enabled		0
	check_freshness			1
	freshness_threshold		300
	use				generic-service
	check_command			check_dummy!1
	notification_interval		0 ; set > 0 if you want to be renotified
}

define hostgroup {
	hostgroup_name			www-servers
	alias 				www
	members 			server
}

define host {
	use 				nonping-host
	host_name 			server
	address 			yoursite.com
}

It is out of scope of this manual to explain Nagios configuration in more details.

The author

Serge Victor, https://keybase.io/ser

The discuss about the extension is on phpBB forum: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=456&t=2294286

Please do not hesitate to send github pull requests or create issues :-)

Thanks to #phpbb-dev IRC channel members for some consultations during all stages of development of this extension.

License

GNU General Public License v2