Centreon and batch-adding hosts

Centreon is a nice GUI wrapper for Nagios. It is using MySQL as its configuration engine, and it functions quite well. One thing Cacti can do but Centreon can’t is mass automatic addition of servers. I have had a new site with an installed Centreon, and I wanted to add about 40 servers to be monitored. This is a tedious work, and I was searching for some semi-automatic method of doing it.
This is not perfect, but it worked for me.
In this case I do not replicate service-group relationship, but only add a mass of servers.

First – create a text file containing a list of servers and IPs. It should look like this:
serv1:1.2.3.4
serv2:10.2.1.3
new_srv:2.3.4.1
…

I have placed in in /tmp/machines

Second – find the last host entry. In my case the DB name is Centreon, so I run the following command:

mysql -u root -p centreon -e’select host_id from host’

This should return a colum with numbers. Find the largest one and increment it by one. In my example the last one was 19, so my initial host_id will be 20.

You should now find the host_template_model_html_id you are to use. There are few methods for that, but the easiest way is to find another host information which matches to some level your desired information. In my case it was called “DB1”, so this looks like this:

mysql -u root -p centreon -e”select host_template_model_htm_id from host where host_name=’DB1′”

Please note that my blog formatting might change the quote character. You might not want to copy/paste it, but type it yourselves.

The result of the above query should give us a template ID. In my case it was “2”, which is fine by me.

If you want a better reference for the values entered, you can do a whole select for a single host to verify your values match mine:

mysql -u root -p centreon -e”select * from host where host_name=’DB1’G”

This should give you long listing and information of the host, as a reference.

My script goes like this, based on the assumptions made above:

#!/bin/bash
HOST=20
for i in `cat /tmp/machines`
do
   NAME=`echo $i | cut -f1 -d:`
   IP=`echo $2 | cut -f2 -d:`
   echo "insert into host values ('$HOST',2,NULL,NULL,1,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'$NAME','$NAME','$IP',NULL,NULL,'2','2','2','2','2',NULL,'2',NULL,NULL,'2','2','2','2',NULL,NULL,'2',NULL,NULL,'0',NULL,'1','1');" >> /tmp/insert_sql.sql
   echo "insert into extended_host_information values('',$HOST,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL);" >> /tmp/insert_sql.sql
   let HOST++
done

This should create a file called /tmp/insert_sql.sql which then should be first reviewed, and then inserted into your database.

Needless to say – back up your database first, just in case:

mysqldump -u root -p –opt -B centreon > /tmp/centreon_backup.sql

and then insert the newly created data:

mysql -u root -p centreon < /tmp/insert_sql.sql

Notice – at this point, no service relationship is created. I think it is quite a chore only to create the nodes. Adding the service relationships complicates things a bit, and I did not want to go there at this specific stage. However, for few tenths of monitored hosts, this is quite a lifesaver.

Notice that this is only Centreon configuration, and you will be required to apply it (through the GUI) to Nagios.