Introduction

For a dedicated Nagios Core server with access to all the relevant parts of the network, making checks is relatively simple using commands and plugins that make ICMP, TCP, and UDP connections to network hosts and services, in order to determine their operating state. These can be used to check any sort of network service, without requiring anything to be installed on the target machine. As an example, when the check_http plugin is used to check a web server, it works in the same way as if a browser was making the request.

However, monitoring a network thoroughly usually has more to it than simply checking network connectivity and availability. It's also a good idea to check properties of the network that don't directly correspond to a network service, and hence can't be directly checked over a network connection.

These are often properties of hardware or the underlying system, such as disk space or system load average, or processes that are configured only to listen locally, commonly...