Nagios check for Varnish Backends

We recently starting using Varnish to cache un-authenticated requests to our web farm. It even has this great feature called grace mode, where it will keep serving a cached version of a page if the back-end server goes down. But we still want to be alerted that the back-end is down.

I wrote a Nagios check to do just that. It's written in Python, and using the varnishadm command-line tool that ships with Varnish.

#!/usr/bin/python
# save as /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_varnish_backends.py

from optparse import OptionParser
import subprocess

def getOptions():
    arguments = OptionParser()
    arguments.add_option("--host", dest="host", help="Host varnishadm is running on", type="string", default="localhost")
    arguments.add_option("--port", dest="port", help="varnishadm port", type="string", default="6082")
    arguments.add_option("--secret", dest="secret", help="varnishadm secret file", type="string", default="/etc/varnish/secret")
    arguments.add_option("--command", dest="command", help="varnishadm backend health command", type="string", default="debug.health")
    return arguments.parse_args()[0]

def run(command, exit_on_fail=True):
    # don't use check_output in order to supportPython 2.6
    process = subprocess.Popen(command.split(" "), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    output, unused_err = process.communicate()
    _retcode = process.poll()
    return output

if __name__ == '__main__':

    options = getOptions()
    varnishadm_raw = run("varnishadm -T %(host)s:%(port)s -S %(secret)s %(command)s" % options.__dict__)

    lines = varnishadm_raw.split("\n")
    backends_sick, backends_healthy = [], []
    for line in lines:
        if line.startswith("Backend"):
            if line.endswith("Sick"):
                backends_sick.append(line)
            else:
                backends_healthy.append(line)

    if not backends_healthy and not backends_sick:
        print "There are NO backends"
        exit(2)

    if backends_sick:
        print "".join(backends_sick)
        exit(2)

    print "All %s backends are healthy" % len(backends_healthy)

Because varnishadm uses a shared secret file, I decided to have the checks run on the actual Varnish hosts, using Nagios NRPE.

# add the following config line on the varnish hosts
vim /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg
command[check_varnish_backends]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_varnish_backends.py

service nagios-nrpe-server restart

# and configure the Nagios server to look for that check
vim /etc/nagios3/conf.d/services_nagios2.cfg
define service {
        use                             generic-service
        hostgroup_name                  proxy-servers
        service_description             check_varnish_backends
        check_command                   check_nrpe_1arg!check_varnish_backends
}

service nagios3 restart

Note: depending on your setup, you may need to use chmod to give the nagios user access to ready the shared secret file (/etc/varnish/secret) on the Varnish servers.

Chase Seibert