Nagios, 2nd Edition

The suppliers of information

The great strength of Nagios—even in comparison with other network monitoring tools—lies in its modular structure. The Nagios core does not contain one single test. Instead it uses external programs for service and host checks, which are known as plugins. The basic equipment already contains a number of standard plugins for the most important application cases. Special requests that go beyond these are answered—provided that you have basic programming knowledge—by plugins that you can write yourself. Before investing time in developing these, however, it is first worth taking a look on the Internet and browsing through the relevant mailing lists,^[2] as there is lively activity in this area. Ready-to-use plugins are ...