[Nagiosplug-devel] Mailman plugin - some dev questions

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

    I've begun work on a Nagios (V1) plugin for mailman and have a couple of 
things I'd like to get some feedback about.  I'm looking at the developer 
guidelines (http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net/developer-guidelines.html) and 
also using some of the existing plugins (1.4.2) to see how others have 
implemented things thus far.


    The plugin checks the amount of items in any of nine Mailman queues against 
warning and critical thresholds.  I can (1) try to squeeze output into an 
eighty character limit (in the worst case of all queues exceeding a threshold 
the output would have to be a bit cryptic?), or (2) I can expect the plugin to 
be called nine separate times, potentially providing nine separate 
notifications given the same scenario.  I'm leaning towards allowing the plugin 
to be called with thresholds for one to nine queues, allowing users to pick 
their method, but I'm curious- what are others' experiences with this type of 
situation?


    I've seen mention of plugins outputting statistics to be stored in RRD, is 
this something plugins are to do completely on their own, or is there a 
standard for outputting data in a particular format to a particular place, 
which Nagios then processes?



    Thanks to everyone for their feedback, and for the great work on Nagios!


- Ivan Fetch.