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Nagios Plugins

A Plugin is command-line script or executable to check the status of host or specific service. Whenever Nagios wants to check the service- or host-state it executes an plugin on the server or the remote host via NSClient++, check_by_ssh or NRPE.

Graphic by Ethan Galstad

About Nagios Plugins in general

As you know, Nagios monitors hosts and services on your network.

Actual host and service checks are performed by separate programs called plugins which return the host or service status to Nagios.

Because the Nagios daemon doesn't do the checks by itself, but uses the plugins to do this work, there are some essential rules for plugins.

A plugin must:

• give you exactly one line as feedback and
• exit with one of the following return codes:
  • 0 = OK
  • 1 = WARNING
  • 2 = CRITICAL
  • 3 = UNKNOWN

A plugin should:

• give you its own short usage documentation if its called with the parameter -h

How to test a plugin?

You can run every check_plugin standalone in a shell to test it.

To do so you should be the unix-user the nagios daemon runs under and you have to be sure that the same environment variables are set as if Nagios is performing the check.

We have a short HowTo for testing plugins.

How to use a plugin?

We have a short combined HowTo for the usage of plugins.

Development of Nagios plugins

If you want to know more about plugin developing, visit the Developer Guidelines Page for Nagios Plugins on Sourceforge

Nagios Plugins

We aim to have a comprehensive list of plugins for nagios where we will give you the help text of the plugins and the option to comment on the plugin.

The documentation for the official Nagios plugins can be found in the man page section of www.nagiosplugins.org.

Plugins from MonitoringExchange

Nagios is a very powerfull tool. Especially, because there are a lot of extensions and plugins available which will let you monitor almost any device and service that can be addressed in a network. Nevertheless, you have to know where all this nice little addons and scripts are located and where to find them on the web or the nagios mailing list. tries to provide a central location to store and link all this files and information.