Nagios ships with a very powerful check_http plugin that allows you to monitor websites in a simple way. This plugin should be enough for a large variety of tasks. However, there are often situations where using only this plugin is not enough.

If you are running a website that is critical to your business, checking only whether the main page is showing up correctly may not be enough. In many cases, you might actually want to be sure that the users are able to log in, orders can be sent out, and reports can be generated correctly.

In such cases, it is not sufficient just to check if a couple of pages work correctly. It might be necessary to write a more complex check that will log you into the website, fill out an order form, send it, and verify whether it shows up in the order history. You may also want to check that a specified text is present on specific pages.

This task is very common when performing automated tests during the development of a site. Not many people perform...