Like just about everyone else on the planet, we use Nagios to monitor our servers. We needed to create a few plugins for Nagios to monitor some services that Nagios didn’t have plugins for; namely Cassandra and Gearman. I wanted to be able to easily create plugins and have them installed with setuptools.

The code above is a simple class that will implement all of the option parsing and such to run a Nagios plugin from the command line. From there you need to implement a plugin. Below is the Gearman plugin that I created. It runs a simple job I created that sums numbers and returns the results. If all goes well then the job should run and the correct sum of the randomly selected numbers should be returned.

Once you’ve got all of that working it’s pretty simple to then add the following snippet of code to your setup.py file.

      entry_points = {
          'console_scripts': [
              'check_gearmand = path.to.nagios.plugins:check_gearmand',
          ]
      },