Nagios, 2nd Edition

H.5 External Commands

The list of external commands has grown larger in Nagios 3.0, so that considerably more things can be set through the relevant interface (see 13.1 The Interface for External Commands, page 292.).

Of special interest here is the command PROCESS_FILE, which is passed a file that itself contains external commands. This allows for the bulk processing of passive checks:

PROCESS_FILE; path/to/file; number

PROCESS_FILE requires the full path to the file that is to be processed. The second argument determines whether the file is kept after processing (0) or deleted (a value not equal to 0).

Two other new commands allow you to make your own notifications. Notifications actually have a fixed type (PROBLEM, RECOVERY, ACKNOWLEDGE, etc.; ...