Nagios command definition files

Question

Im following the tutorial from this page. Writing Custom Nagios Plugins

Everything is working fine my only problem is that the first config file your supposed to edit is the command-plugins.cfg file and I cant find the file. I did the following command

find / -name "*cfg"

and the results showed all my nagios cfg files but command-plugins.cfg was not one of them.

So I continued on with the tutorial and did everything else. Nagios tried to perform my custom service check but this error returned

(Return code of 127 is out of bounds - plugin may be missing) 

So im assuming that the command definition still has to be made but where? Does anyone know how to resolve this?

Answer 1

You can make changes to any of the *.cfg files that Nagios knows about — you do not have to actually have one called command-plugins.cfg. The important thing about a command definition is that it has the right format, e.g.:

define command {
    command_name    an_alias_to_the_command
    command_line    /pathto/your_command_script --arg1 --arg2
}

Nagios will use one major config file to determine all other files to load. For me it is /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg. This file contains directives, such as cfg_file and cfg_dir to load either an individual file, or all *.cfg files in a directory.

I prefer to split my commands file based on my own categories, so mine has an entry in it:

cfg_dir=/etc/nagios/commands

This means I will load all the *.cfg files in my /etc/nagios/commands directory.

You should look at your equivilent nagios.cfg file to determine all the places it will load *.cfg files from — you should be able to determine which file to edit or where to create a new file from there.