Your application might also want to have some control over Nagios. You might want to expose an interface for users to take control of your monitoring system, for example, a web interface or a client-server system. You might also want to handle custom authorization and the access control list, but this is something that is beyond the functionality offered by the web interface that Nagios comes with.

In such cases, it is best to create your own system to read the current status, as well as to send commands directly over the external command pipe. In both cases, this is very easy to do from any programming language.

The first thing we can do is to show Nagios' current status. This requires the reading of the status.dat file, parsing it to any data format, and then manipulating it. The format of the file is relatively simple—each object is enclosed in a section and each section contains one or more name=value directives. For example, the following is a definition of information...