yanpp

Yet another Nagios ping plugin

This is an ICMP ping plugin for Nagios which aims to recreate some of the features of Smokeping inside Nagios, without needing to set up Smokeping. It is a feature improvement on Nagios's bundled check_ping plugin in terms of the performance data and graphing.

Installation

It is recommended to install this plugin from the RPM package, to automatically handle paths and dependencies.

To install this plugin by hand, first make sure you have a working Perl installation with the following modules available:

• Net::Ping
• Getopt::Long
• Time::HiRes
• List::Util
• Nagios-Plugins

These modules can be installed from packages on Red Hat by doing:

yum install perl perl-Getopt-Long perl-Time-HiRes perl-Scalar-List-Utils nagios-plugins-perl

Copy the actual plugin itself (check_yanpp) to your system's Nagios plugin directory (/usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/ on Red Hat systems).

If you are using PNP4Nagios to generate graphs, it is also recommended to install the template file so the graphs render properly. Copy check_yanpp.php to your PNP template directory (/usr/share/nagios/html/pnp4nagios/templates.dist on Red Hat systems).

Usage

The only mandatory parameter is -H|--host to provide the hostname.

check_yanpp -H <host> [-w <warnrta>,<warnpl>%] [-c <critrta>,<critpl>%] -n 5 -s 10

• -V --version Print the version of the program
• -h --help Print this help message
• -w --warning Comma-separated warning thresholds for RTA and packet loss. Default: 100,10%
• -c --critical Comma-separated critical thresholds for RTA and packet loss. Default: 1000,50%
• -H --hostname Hostname or IP address to ping with ICMP packets
• -n --number Number of ICMP packets to send. Default: 5
• -s --sleep Time to wait between pings in milliseconds. Default: 10

Configuration in Nagios

After installing the plugin, you need to configure a new command in Nagios. The example below is the bare minimum you will need (check the path).

define command {
    command_name    check_yanpp
    command_line    /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_yanpp -H $HOSTADDRESS$
}

If you want to set any of the optional parameters, just append them to the line.

define command {
    command_name    check_yanpp
    command_line    /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_yanpp -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -w 200,20% -c 2000,75% -n 10 -s 100
}

Once the command has been defined, you can use it in a service definition. You can either create a new service for check_yanpp or you can simply substitute check_ping for check_yanpp to get the same monitoring but with more info.

define service {
    check_command           check_yanpp
    host_name               host.example.com
    service_description     Ping
}

Restart Nagios for the changes to take effect.