About MK Livestatus

MK Livestatus is a completely new approach for accessing status and also historic data from hosts and services in Nagios monitoring and alerting system. Livestatus does not actively write out data. Instead, it opens a socket by which data can be retrieved on demand. The socket allows you to send a request for hosts, services or other pieces of data and get an immediate answer.

MK Livestatus installation is necessary if you want to run some Nagios add-ons like NagVis or Thruk. We will be installing MK Livestatus on a CentOS 6.4 64bit minimal install.

Let’s start our MK Livestatus install!

1. Download MK Livestatus

Download latest MK-Livestatus tar from http://mathias-kettner.de and transfer it to your server

2. Install dependencies

Install C++ compiler (if you don’t already have it installed)

yum install gcc-c++ -y

3. Extract MK-Livestatus

tar -xvzf mk-livestatus-VERSION.tar.gz

4. Configure MK-Livestatus

./configure

5. Make MK-Livestatus

Use -j parameter for multi threaded compile

make -j 4
make install

6. Configure Nagios

Configure Nagios for MK Livestatus – add this to nagios.cfg (more on Nagios configuration) – find file livestatus.o on your sistem and add that path to this file to Nagios config:

broker_module=/usr/local/nagios/mk-livestatus/livestatus.o /usr/local/nagios/var/rw/live
event_broker_options=-1

7. Check nagios.log

Check nagios.log file (/usr/local/nagios/var/nagios.log file) if MK Livestatus has started succesfully:

[1365069834] livestatus: Livestatus 1.2.0p4 by Mathias Kettner. Socket: '/usr/local/nagios/var/rw/live'
[1365069834] livestatus: Please visit us at http://mathias-kettner.de/
[1365069834] livestatus: Hint: please try out OMD - the Open Monitoring Distribution
[1365069834] livestatus: Please visit OMD at http://omdistro.org
[1365069834] livestatus: Finished initialization. Further log messages go to /usr/local/nagios/var/livestatus.log
[1365069834] Event broker module '/usr/local/nagios/mk-livestatus/livestatus.o' initialized successfully