Nagios offers a very powerful mechanism for receiving events and commands from external applications — the external commands pipe. This is a pipe file created on a file system that Nagios uses to receive incoming messages. The name of the file is rw/nagios.cmd
and it is located in the directory passed as the localstatedir
option during compilation. If you have followed the compilation and installation instructions given in Chapter 2 of this book, the file name will be /var/nagios/rw/nagios.cmd
.
The communication does not use any authentication or authorization — the only requirement is to have write access to the pipe file. An external command file is usually writable by the owner and the group; the usual group used is nagioscmd
. If you want a user to be able to send commands to the Nagios daemon, simply add that user to this group.
A small limitation of the command pipe is that there is no way to get any results back and so it is not possible to send any query commands...