Recently we purchased a MessPC station for our server room, and my co-worker and myself had the wish it to be integrated within Nagios. Well, so far so good. The first I did was put both keywords into Google.
That pretty fast brought up the manufacturer’s page (sorry it’s German only) about the device supporting Nagios by means of either SNMP or a specific plugin called pcmeasure. So I went ahead and tried both ways.
Using SNMP has the advantage that it’s quickly integrated into Nagios and it doesn’t need a separate plugin for that to work. But it also has a huge disadvantage. check_snmp doesn’t support performance data, which is quite handy if you do want to do graphing from Nagios’ results.
Next I tried the pcmeasure plugin. At first it worked great (that is from plain command line), but then I tried to integrate it into Nagios (well, I did integrate it); but got “Plugin did not exit properly”.
Today, after I had the plugin commented out for about two weeks, I finally had time to look at the issue again. First I thought, simply using utils.pm’s error values would be sufficient for ePN to quit yapping, but apparently it had *real* problems with the pod2usage used within.
So I basically rewrote the plugin (well, not really; it’s still the same – but without the pod2usage and working in Nagios 3.0.3).