Submitting passive checks from a remote host with NSCA

In this recipe, we'll show you how to automate the submission of passive checks by a remote host using the example of a monitored host, ithaca.example.net, to submit a passive check to a Nagios Core server with information about how its BACKUP service is performing.

For example, if the backup process gets completed successfully, we configure the monitored host to submit a passive check result, specifying that the BACKUP service should have the OK status. However, if there were a problem with the backup, the monitored host could send a passive check result with a WARNING or CRITICAL status.

In both cases, Nagios Core does no checking of its own; it trusts the results submitted by its target host.

To accomplish this setup, we'll use the NSCA add-on. We'll install the NSCA server on the Nagios Core server and the NSCA client program send_nsca on the monitored host.

Getting ready

Here, we assume that you have already followed...