[Nagiosplug-help] Newbie gets no status information

[Andreas Ericsson]

Colin McKinnon wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm a Nagios newbie, but like to think I know what I'm doing with computers.
> 
> I've written a couple of plugins using PHP. These seem to be reporting
> the status correctly in Nagios (v. 2.9) but the 'information text' is
> not showing in the frontend.
> 
> e.g. when I run my script from the command line:
> 
> $ ./check_portal_response.php -p LP -m response -t 10 -w 4 -c 2
> RESPONSE OK : Last ws1 response=0.786052;Last ws2 response=0.687574
> $
> 

What does it say if you try

$ ./check_portal_response.php -p LP -m response -t 10 -w 4 -c 2 2>/dev/null | \
	sed 1q

?

Basically, that should show you what Nagios will display, assuming you're running
it as the Nagios user, and from the directory that Nagios runs it from.

> But in the web frontend the 'Status information' column is blank.
> 
> I've tried:
> 
> MEASURE STATUS - INFO
> MEASURE STATUS: INFO
> MEASURE STATUS : INFO
> 

What gave you the notion that Nagios cares about the format of your output?
Or rather, where did you try that?

> but none seem to work.
> 

I'm not surprised. Nagios doesn't care about the text you print out. It only
cares about the return code of your plugin.

> I've also tried to google 'nagios plugin "status information"' but
> found nothing relevant.
> 

Have you checked the nagiosplug documentation? The interface is 

> I have confirmed that my script is writing to STDOUT.
> 

Sweet. Then you can skip the first step above that I wanted you to try and
focus on finding the error-paths that make your plugin crash before it writes
anything at all to stdout.

> Any ideas?
> 

add

	echo "Oy daddy! I'm alive\n";

to the top of your script. If that output shows in Nagios, something is wrong
in your plugin (most likely because it can't access one resource or another
that you, as a console user, can).

If it *doesn't* show, I'd suspect permission errors that cause PHP to bomb
out early and print an error message to stderr.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231