From Wiki Centreon

Plugins are agent that nagios request to run. Often writen in shell or perl sctipts, they are design to make interrogation of services or material that can be local or distant.

There are different way to use plugins, that could be active (using snmp MIB or NRPE) or passive (using NSCA). More info about Nagios Plugins available in Nagios documentation.

Plugins are first designed to report info to Nagios, but Nagios can forward data that should be used by another application. This is possible in when Nagios 'perfdata' using has been properly configured.

Oreon developped its own pluging using RRDTool and Oreon's ServiceId to be able to graph data. Those plugins have all a name in 'chech_grap_(...)' and can only run with Oreon.

• any troubles with snmp (what is that stuff ?), have a look here (fr) :

http://christian.caleca.free.fr/snmp/

• a specific material to monitor, (what is its MIB ?), have a look here :

http://www.oidview.com/mibs/detail.html

More plugins

Nagios snmp plugins are available here

• http://nagios.manubulon.com/
• http://www.nagiosexchange.org/

Monitoring over openVZ

have a look here :

http://wiki.openvz.org/Monitoring_openvz_resources_using_nagios_and_snmp

and here (traffic monitoring on virtual machins) :

http://wiki.openvz.org/Traffic_accounting_with_iptables