Integrating PostgreSQL with the Nagios monitoring system is the goal of many system administrators. In many cases, Nagios or a Nagios-compliant solution is chosen to handle monitoring, alerting, and all that.

To integrate PostgreSQL with Nagios it makes sense to check out the Bucardo project, which offers a plugin to handle monitoring nicely. The plugin can be downloaded from the website http://bucardo.org/wiki/Check_postgres.

Once the module has been installed, administrators can enjoy a rich variety of checks: http://bucardo.org/check_postgres/check_postgres.pl.html.

Depending on your type of setup, you might want to use different modules. For example, database_size might be a perfectly valid check if you happen to run a large scale system growing larger and larger. It is somewhat pointless if you are serving static, historic documents to end users. So, we can only encourage system administrators to think for themselves and really try to figure out what makes sense and...