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What is exact difference between active and passive checks in Nagios ?

I have checked on google found passive check is related to external services. Now what are these external services. And I need to configure passive then how to do ?

Also unable to find relevant about Active checks in nagios

Virender Punia
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  • https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagioscore/docs/nagioscore/3/en/passivechecks.html and https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagioscore/docs/nagioscore/3/en/activechecks.html – Rohlik May 18 '18 at 12:23

1 Answers1

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Active checks.

This checks are initiated by Nagios process intelf via its internal schedule and logic. When Nagios process needs to check the status of a host or service it will execute a plugin and pass it information about what needs to be checked himself.

Link for more formal documentation is here.

Passive checks.

Nagios process has command file (with default compilation params it is /usr/local/nagios/var/rw/nagios.cmd), passive checks are some external commands which writes in this file commands about checks in form such as

datesec=$(date '+%s')
echo "[${datesec}] PROCESS_SERVICE_CHECK_RESULT;${host};${service};${state};${message}" \
     >> /usr/local/nagios/var/rw/nagios.cmd

You could realize this checks in any way you could to exec the simular command or system call. It may be external SNMP Trap, external monitoring system or even your local crontab job, but this initially not goes from nagios process.

Link for more formal documentation is here.

Sasha Golikov
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