Nagios Plugins

Overview

Nagios plugins are standalone extensions to Nagios Core that provide low-level intelligence on how to monitor anything and everything with Nagios Core. Plugins operate as standalone applications, but are generally designed to be executed by Nagios Core.

Plugins process command-line arguments, go about the business of performing a specific type of check, and then return the results to Nagios Core for further processing. Plugins can either be compiled binaries (written in C, C++, etc) or executable scripts (shell, Perl, PHP, etc).

Official And Other Plugins

There are nearly 2,000 Nagios plugins that have been developed by hundreds of Nagios community members. However, there are roughly 50 plugins that are considered the "official" Nagios plugins.

Official Nagios plugins are developed and maintained by the official Nagios Plugins team. The scope of the official Nagios plugins distribution includes plugin libraries that are used by both both official and additional plugins. The information contained below on this page generally applies to the official Nagios plugins.

In addition to the official Nagios plugins, you can find hundreds of other Nagios plugins for monitoring all types of hardware, services, metrics, and applications at Nagios Exchange.

Downloads

The Nagios Plugins can be downloaded at http://www.nagios.org/download/plugins.

Development Team Site

The Nagios Plugins team development site is located at www.nagiosplugins.org.

Roadmap

Plans for future versions of the Nagios Plugins can be found here.

Documentation

Documentation for the Nagios Plugins can be found here.

Developer Information

Developer Information for the Nagios Plugins can be found below.

• Plugin API
• Plugin Development Guidelines