Icinga – How to add the check_yum plugin

Icinga, an open source monitoring tool, monitors networks and its resource, can send notifications, and generate reports. Icinga is scalable and can monitor small to large network environments. Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible. Nagios configurations, plugins and addons can be used with Icinga. Icinga has retained the existing features of Nagios, however, is actively maintained with additional functionality, features, and patches as requested by the user community.

The typical installation of Icinga will use the Nagios plugins. However, there are many other user community supported plugins that some may find useful. One such plugin is the check_yum plugin for Linux. The purpose of this plugin is to monitor yum updates on Linux servers. There are a couple of plugins with the same name, however, only one of them seemed to work as advertised, check_yum.

I couldn’t find a single source for installing an additional plugin, however, this approach should work with the addition of many other custom plugin.

Earlier versions of Icinga will likely have a different folder structure. You may have to tailor the instructions below to your particular installation. This installation was tested with the most recent version of Icinga, version 1.6.1.

Install the check_yum plugin

  • Download the check_yum plugin to your Linux box.
  • Copy the check_yum plugin to /usr/local/icinga/libexec.
  • Make it executable, chmod 755 check_yum
  • yum install yum-security
  • edit /usr/local/icinga/etc/objects/commands.cfg to add the following section to it and save commands.cfg
# 'check_yum' command definition
define command{
command_name check_yum
command_line $USER1$/check_yum
}
  • Add to the host file /usr/local/icinga/etc/hosts/yourservername.cfg
define service{
use local-service           ; Name of service template to use
host_name                   yourservernamehere
service_description         YUM
check_command               check_yum
notifications_enabled       0
}
  • Restart the Icinga service
service icinga reload

Source(s)
http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Operating-Systems/Linux
http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Uncategorized/Operating-Systems/Linux/Check_Yum/details