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cucumber-nagios

cucumber-nagios allows you to write high-level behavioural tests of web application, and plug the results into Nagios.

As Bradley Taylor put it:

“Instead of writing boring monitoring plugins from scratch, 
you can now do behavior driven ops!

Transform from a grumpy, misanthropic sysadmin to a hipster, 
agile developer instantly.”

Setting up a project

To set up a standalone cucumber-nagios project, run:

cucumber-nagios-gen project <project-name>

This will spit out a bunch of files in the directory specified as .

Check the README within this directory for specific instructions for managing the project.

Writing Features

Within your project, I suggest you put your features under under features/$fqdn/$name.feature.

You'll want to have a read of the Cucumber documentation, however your tests will look something like this:

Feature: google.com.au
  It should be up
  And I should be able to search for things

  Scenario: Searching for things
    Given I visit "http://www.google.com"
    When I fill in "q" with "wikipedia"
    And I press "Google Search"
    Then I should see "www.wikipedia.org"

There's a collection of steps that will cover most of the things you'll be testing for in features/steps/webrat_steps.rb.

You can write custom steps for testing specific output and behaviour, e.g. in features/smh.com.au/smh.feature:

Feature: smh.com.au
  It should be up
  And provide links to content

  Scenario: Visiting home page
    When I go to http://smh.com.au/
    Then I should see site navigation
    And there should be a section named "Opinion"

There aren't steps for "Then I should see site navigation", so you have to write one yourself. :-) In features/smh.com.au/steps/smh_steps.rb:

Then /^I should see site navigation$/ do                                                                    
  doc = Nokogiri::HTML(response.body.to_s)                                                                  
  doc.css("ul#nav li a").size.should > 5                                                                    
end

You can use Nokogiri for testing responses with XPath matchers and CSS selectors.

I suggest you use bin/cucumber directly so you can get better feedback when writing your tests:

bin/cucumber --require bin/common.rb \
             --require features/ 
             features/smh/smh.feature

Running

Invoke the cucumber feature with the cucumber-nagios script:

bin/cucumber-nagios features/smh.com.au/smh.feature

cucumber-nagios can be run from anywhere:

/path/to/bin/cucumber-nagios /path/to/features/smh/smh.feature

It should return a standard Nagios-formatted response string:

Critical: 0, Warning: 0, 2 okay | passed=2, failed=0.0, total=2

Steps that fail will show up in the "Critical" total, and steps that pass show up in the "okay" total.

The value printed at the end is in Nagios's Performance Data format, so it can be graphed and the like.

Caveats

You may want to think about keeping to one scenario to a file, otherwise you'll get multiple lines of output for a test:

Critical: 1, Warning: 0, 2 okay | value=2.000000;;;;
Critical: 1, Warning: 0, 4 okay | value=4.000000;;;;

I assume Nagios will only read the last line, so this might be an ok behaviour when you want to test for an aggregate of failures across a site.