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 3.0 server that was compiled with Net-SNMP libraries available to build the check_snmp
plugin, part of the Nagios Plugins set.
We can find a way to monitor an arbitrary hardware device on a local or remote machine as follows:
Check if official or unofficial Nagios Core plugins already exist for polling the particular device. The best place to start is with Nagios Exchange at http://exchange.nagios.org/; just search for the make of hardware, and see if a plugin already...