In this recipe, we'll learn a general strategy for monitoring the properties of hardware devices. Because of the different ways that vendors implement their hardware, this tends to be less straightforward than monitoring standard network services.
There are at least four general approaches to this problem.
You will need to know some specifics about the hardware that you want to monitor, including the model number. You should preferably also have a Nagios Core 4.0 server that was compiled with Net-SNMP libraries available to build the check_snmp
plugin.
We can find a way to monitor an arbitrary hardware device on a local or remote machine as follows:
Check if the official or unofficial Nagios Core plugins already exist for polling the particular device. The best place to start is with Nagios Exchange at https://exchange.nagios.org/; just search for the make of the hardware and see if a plugin already exists, as per the Finding...