This is how I want to use Salt Stack and Nagios plugins for server monitoring

This blog post by Russel Ballestrini is in the direction of using Salt for at least part of your infrastructure management systems.

http://ift.tt/1f8H2lk

For system monitoring, I’d like to be able to run “salt ‘*’ cmd.run….” commands periodically. Have Nagios/Icinga plugins on the minions that get called by the Salt commands. Dump the output straight into an elasticsearch cluster and then do stuff with it from there.

I reason is that I’ve found Nagios and Icinga to be really really complex to set up and configure. Why not remove the need to set that up and just do a lot of the work with Salt? Alert thresholds, alerting systems, statistical stuff would be something to still figure out (yeah, really easy, that).

Maybe this is just roll-your-own pie in the sky thinking, but it sure would be nice to be able to use Salt for management as well as the monitoring/scheduling engine.