Allowing and submitting passive checks

In this recipe, we'll learn how to configure Nagios Core to accept passive checks for a service. This allows both users and external applications to directly submit the results of checks to Nagios Core, rather than having the application seek them out itself through polling with active checks, performed via plugins such as check_http or check_ping.

We'll show one simple example of a passive check, flagging a service called BACKUP for an existing host. We'll show how to do this via the web interface, which is very easy, and via the external commands file, which is slightly more complex but much more flexible and open to automation.

The idea is that when a user or process receives confirmation that the backup process on a host has completed correctly, they are able to supply a check result of OK directly to the service, without Nagios Core needing to poll anything itself.

Getting ready

You should be running a Nagios Core 3.0 or newer server. You should also...