# MKLivestatus backend

MKLivestatus is a very simple and smart Nagios eventbroker module. Livestatus is concepted and tuned to reduce disk, memory and cpu load caused by live-data processing on the Nagios system. Just as NDO, Livestatus makes use of the Nagios Event Broker API and loads a binary module into the Nagios process. But other than the NDO, Livestatus does not actively write out data e.g. to the disk. Instead, it opens a socket for external applications to connect to and fetches the current status information from Nagios. For details about the new data access provider take a look at the official documentation.

Since the first NagVis 1.5 release the mklivestatus backend is included on delivery. It performs much better than all other existing backends and comes with less overhead than other backends. No additional database is needed to make this backend work.

Value | Default | Description
--- | --- | ---

socket

unix:/usr/local/nagios/var/rw/live

The socket to connect to can be a local unix socket or a tcp socket. You have to define the type at the beginning of the string. Set "unix:" for unix sockets or "tcp:" for tcp sockets.

New in 1.9.16:Since Checkmk 1.6.0 it is possible to encrypt the Livestatus channel using TLS. To connnect to such a channel use "tcp-tls:".

In case of the unix socket you need to specify the path of the livestatus unix socket to connect to.

When using a tcp socket you have to enter a host address and a tcp port using the following scheme: <host>:<port>. The host address can be an IP address or an FQDN.

timeout | 5 | New in 1.6.4: This option controls the connect timeout of the livestatus socket. This is just a fallback. To prevent timeouts when accessing remote sites you really should configure a statushost for the backend. For details take a look at the general backend parameters documented in the backend section of the main configuration format description.
verify_tls_peer | 1 | New in 1.9.16: Only relevant when you connect to a Livestatus TLS encrypted socket. This can be used to turn off the peer certificate verification. In case it is enabled, you will have to set the `verify_tls_ca_path` option.
verify_tls_ca_path |  | New in 1.9.16: Configure an absolute path that points to a CA chain file which is then used to verify the certificate of the Livestatus TLS server. You can, for example in Checkmk sites, point it to the, "Trusted certificate authorities file of Checkmk (/omd/sites/[site-id]/var/ssl/ca-certificates.crt) to use the same trust configuration in NagVis and Checkmk.

There are also some general parameters. You can read about them in main configuration format description.