Chapter 2. Working with Commands and Plugins

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

  • Finding a plugin
  • Installing a plugin
  • Removing a plugin
  • Customizing an existing command
  • Using an alternative check command for a host
  • Writing a new plugin from scratch

Introduction

Nagios Core is perhaps best thought of less as a monitoring tool, and more as a monitoring framework. Its modular design can use any kind of program which returns appropriate values based on some kind of check, such as a check_command plugin for a host or service. This is where the concepts of commands and plugins come into play.

For Nagios Core, a plugin is any program that can be used to gather information about a host or service. To ensure that a host was responding to PING ...

Get Nagios Core Administration Cookbook now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.