Our friends at Bucardo created a useful, general purpose PostgreSQL checking utility. The check_postgres tool currently has an inventory of more than 50 checks to monitor PostgreSQL servers.
While this is an exceptionally useful tool, integrating it into our overall stack is necessary to fully take advantage of its capabilities. This recipe will cover the basic usage and integration with Nagios for easy PostgreSQL monitoring of large database clusters.
Though some Linux distributions package the check_postgres utility for easy installation, the versions that are included are usually very old. We recommend that you obtain a copy of the latest check_postgres source code. At the time of writing this book, the latest version is 2.21.0, released on September 24, 2013. Obtain the latest copy of the check_postgres source code from http://bucardo.org/wiki/Check_postgres.
As we want to use Nagios to execute the check_postgres, please follow the steps in the...