Installing a plugin

In this recipe, we'll install a custom plugin that we retrieved from Nagios Exchange onto a Nagios Core server, so that we can use it as a Nagios Core command and hence check a service with it.

Getting ready

You should have a Nagios Core 3.0 or newer server running with a few hosts and services configured already, and have found an appropriate plugin to install, to solve some particular monitoring need. Your Nagios Core server should have internet connectivity to allow you to download the plugin directly from the website.

In this example we'll use check_rsync, which is available on the Web at http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Network-Protocols/Rsync/check_rsync/details.

This particular plugin is quite simple, consisting of a single Perl script with very basic dependencies. If you want to install this script as an example, then the server will also need to have a Perl interpreter installed; it's installed in /usr/bin/perl on many systems.

This example will also include...