Plugin Setup Notes

Some notes to setup my monitoring plugins.

Dependencies

My plugins come with some dependencies. I’m trying to list them on their website, but sometimes I forget something considered to be obvious. Please notify me if you run into trouble. Most of the plugins also expect to find the utils.pm and utils.sh in /usr/lib/nagios/plugins (Debian style). If these files are located somewhere else on your machine, you might need to adjust the path in the source. Feel free to ping me if you need some help!

Embedding into Nagios/Icinga

In the following I suppose you have Icinga or Nagios installed. Otherwise I recommend to read the instructions of the software you are using.

Setup with NRPE

On you monitoring server you need to create a service section like:

define service {
	host_name			YOUR_CLIENT
	service_description	YOUR_DESCRIPTION
	check_command		check_nrpe!SAMPLE_COMMAND
	use					generic-service
}

On the client you also have to define the command SAMPLE_COMMAND , for example:

command[SAMPLE_COMMAND]=/path/to/the/plugin arguments

Setup on the monitoring server itself

If you want to run the plugin on your monitoring server itself, you need to create a command that executes the plugin:

define command {
	command_name	SAMPLE_COMMAND
	command_line	/path/to/the/plugin arguments
}

And also create a service section like:

define service {
	host_name			localhost
	service_description	YOUR_DESCRIPTION
	check_command		SAMPLE_COMMAND!ARGUMENTS
	use					generic-service
}

Disclamer

These installation instructions are just for copy&paste supposes. If you’ve never heard about Icinga I recommend to read some basic documents ;-)