Some questions before switching to nagios

[Brian Rectanus]

Hello,
  I am currently monitoring our systems here with mon.  As we are
expanding our systems and services, mon is getting too complex to
maintain.  Nagios looks like a nice alternative, but at first glance, I
see a limitation in what can be returned from a plugin.  It seems that
only a single line of output is read from the plugin.  This seems very
limiting to me.  Currently, with mon, I get both a summary (one line)
and details (as many lines as you want, in any format).  For example,
for a disk freespace problem, I would get a summary of say 'hostname
disk freespace low' and a detail listing the filesystems with problems. 
Another example would be a load problem: sumarry: 'hostname has high
load', and the detail would list the load and the top 10 processes at
the time of measurment with their cooresponding CPU/mem usage.  This is
very useful as our pagers would get the simple summary and you could
check your email or the mon web page for the details.

I did a quick search in the FAQ and archives, but did not turn up
anything overly intersting on this subject.  For me this is a required
feature and I cannot imagine why such a limitation would be imposed, so
my first thought is that I must be overlooking something.

So, my questions are: Is this truly a limitation with nagios?  If it is,
the is there a way to work around this?  If need be, is there intrest in
this feature being added to nagios (by me) and would a patch be
accepted?

Thanks,
-Brian


-- 
Brian Rectanus               Information Tech Spec III -- DBA
Virginia Tech, DBMS          Blacksburg, VA                 
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