Nov 5, 2014
5 mins read
During the installation of your monitoring platform, you probably install nagios plugins package which provide some basic plugins.
Until now everything is fine in this story but don’t expect for an happy end with Nagios … Troll inside
Indeed the Nagios plugins project was splitted in two different projects (Nagios plugins and monitored plugins), you’ll tell me “OK hum but why this split ? both teams can’t work together ? what is the difference between the two projects ?”
I won’t lie you, I don’t have the answer but let’s try to understand.
In the begining of the year, monitoring plugins published an article on its new web site to announce the new project name.
Nine days after, Nagios enterprise published an answer due to the lot of trolls on social networks. This answer is a kind of personal attack to a Nagios competitor.
There is a lot of misunderstanding around this event, I think we’ll never know the reason of this plit so let’s see the difference between the two projects.
The current stable version of Monitoring Plugins release is 2.1 and the current stable release of Nagios plugins is 2.0.3. You could see the commit activity of those projects on Github:
Changes on both projects are the same or nearly … Maybe in the future changes could be different or not … So I would like to say use your favorite project.
I don’t know how major distros like Debian or CentOS provide monitoring plugins package but I think there is repositories for each distro. The Nagios plugins package is also available on major distro repositories.
In some case basic plugins are not sufficient because people need to monitor some specific things and there is no plugins for that in the basic monitoring package.
Well how to find the additional plugins ? Packages are available like for the basic plugins? I think ewcomers could have those kind of questions.
Let’s see the different projects or website that allow you to find additional plugins. It’s very interesting to see those different methods used by the different projects.
I hope this will help users to find some additional plugins for their monitoring platform.
Icinga create Icinga Exchange, this website is the new Monitoring Exchange platform.
On this website you can :
There is a detailed FAQ to help you to use this platform.
I like this approach but it could be a nightmare like Nagios Exchange.
Nagios create Nagios Exchange, this website allow you to hosts Nagios Addons.
On this website you can:
This site is very old and in my opinion a lot of plugins need to be rewritten.
Since last year Centreon works on One plugin to rule them all , this system must replace the former Centreon plugins.
One plugin to monitoring with thousand of checks, it’s a good idea but is it maintainable easier ? I can’t give you the answer.
You could find all available checks on project page
Shinken.io is a platform which provides packs, modules for Shinken.
Packs are a small subset of configuration files, templates or pictures about a subject, like Linux or windows. Some packs provide plugins but not all.
You could install and search packs and modules through a CLI (shinken-cli). This system is limited to Shinken.
If you want to hae more information about shinken packs you could read its documentation.
I like this method because there is a CLI.
Thanks to Jean Gabès for his feedback.
Yes really sometime you could find some plugins on GitHub.
The goal of those platforms is good, but it’s really difficult to manage and to track bad plugins. Of course you could leave a comment to say “it doesn’t works for me” but I think we could could make it better.
Indeed if we could have some guys who could:
It’s a hard work and I think we need more than one guy for those kind of task.
I remember few years ago, when I had to download plugins from nagios exchange and take some time to fix issues on downloaded plugins …
I hope you’ll enjoy my article.
Feel free to contact me if I forgot to quote a place where you could find additional monitoring plugins.
All plugins found on those platforms could be used with those monitoring engine: Shinken, Centreon, Icinga, Naemon, Nagios, …
Remember than you need to verify if the plugin works before deploy it on your production platform.
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