Nagios, 2nd Edition

Taking in information from outside

For tests, notifications, and so on, Nagios makes use of external programs, but the reverse is also possible: through a separate interface (see 13.1 The Interface for External Commands from page 292), independent programs can send status information and commands to Nagios. The Web interface makes widespread use of this possibility, which allows the administrator to send interactive commands to Nagios. But a backup program unknown to Nagios can also transmit a success or failure to Nagios, as well as to a syslog daemon. The possibilities are limitless. Thanks to this interface, Nagios allows distributed monitoring. This involves several decentralized Nagios installations sending their test results to a central ...