Monitor file-dates, timemachine backups

[druber]

I am working on making Zabbix monitor the contents of a folder containing timemachine backups. OSX with timemachine server can warn you when backups are out of date, but i would like to monitor this with zabbix.
If i run

/usr/bin/stat -lt "%Y%m%d %H:%M" /Volumes/backup/folder/* | /usr/bin/awk '{print $3 , $6}'

-I get a nicely formatted list containing ownername of the backup, and the date in a format that i think zabbix would be happy to work with,

user.name1 20130524
user.name2 20130619
user.name3 20130618
user.name4 ...
...

Any suggestions on how I could make zabbix pick out users from this list of users with backups older than 10 days and make items and triggers dynamically?

Regards,
druber

[dmartel]

You could make a Perl script (or Python, Batch, etc.) and send your data using zabbix_sender.

When you call the zabbix_sender, you have to give in parameters the Zabbix server address and the data file you have.

The data file is formatted like so (one data per line):

<host_name> <item_name> <value>

For creating dynamic hosts, you could take a look at the Zabbix JSON API.

I hope it helps!

David

[druber]

Thanks dmartel, I'll look into zabbix_sender and making a script to produce the input file won't be difficult. Could I use date in a triggerfuction to pick out old backups? There is something like :

"Current date is > than N"

-But I am not sure how to make this work, and I can't find any examples of how this is used..

druber

[dmartel]

I don't think so. But since your date formatting represent a number, your item data type could be numeric (unsigned).

In this way, you'll be able to ajust your triggers using numeric values.

David