Dealing with monitoring tools

There are a couple of monitoring tools around these days that make your life easier.

One of the most popular monitoring tools around is Nagios. It is widely used and supports a variety of software components.

If you want to use Nagios to monitor your PostgreSQL cluster, it is necessary to install a plugin capable of running tests relevant to replication. Such plugins are also available for PostgreSQL, and can be downloaded for free from http://bucardo.org/wiki/Check_postgres. The Bucardo plugins for Nagios are not just able to test replication but are also a standard software component for monitoring PostgreSQL as a whole.

Installing check_postgres

Once you have downloaded the plugin from the Bucardo website, it is easy to install it, as follows:

1. The first step is to extract the .tar archive:

   tar xvfz check_postgres.tar.gz

2. Now you can enter the newly created directory and run Perl Makefile:

   perl Makefile.PL

3. Finally, you can compile and install the code:

   make
   make install...