The query handler is a major new feature of Nagios 4. It allows two-way communication between Nagios internal processes and external applications, and is designed to be extensible. The future versions of Nagios may provide more functionality using the query handlers.

The query handler communicates using Unix domain sockets (for more details, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_domain_socket). These are meant for communication between processes on same machine. Unix domain sockets use filesystems as names for remote addresses. For example, /var/nagios/rw/nagios.qh is the path to the query handler's Unix domain socket for an installation performed according to the steps given in Chapter 2, Installing Nagios 4. Filesystem permissions are used to determine whether a process can connect to the other side—so it is possible to limit the access to the query handler to specific operating system users or groups.

Unix domain sockets are very similar to named pipes, such...