[ILUG] Nagios plugins..

[Braun Brelin]

Folks,

I posted this to the Nagios development mailing list, but I'll repost it
here in case anyone on this list has done Nagios plugin development and
can answer my question...

thanks,

Braun Brelin
OpenApp



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Hello all,

this is my first time posting to this list.  I'm trying to create a
custom plugin that monitors an applications log file in real time. 

I'm unclear as to whether or not I can do this explicitly with a plugin
(the real time aspect). 

I'm running a Nagios 2.x management console that's getting data from a
production Linux system running nrpe.  The real time monitoring needs to
run on the production box.  

I'm trying to create the plugin (using Perl as my language) thus; 

1.  Create a daemon that actually monitors the log file. 
2.  On a specific event, the daemon will write status information to a
data file. 
3.  The plugin will read the data file at a specified interval and send
it back through the nrpe daemon to the nagios console.  

Is this the right way to go about it?  I don't quite see how to merge
the steps so that the plugin does all of the functionality in one
program.  Since the code needs to run in real time, for example, I can't
output any of the Nagios error codes since the daemon never quits unless
the entire system goes down. 

Thanks for your help.

Braun Brelin
OpenApp