About PNP

PNP requires valid performance data from nagios plugins.

So what is this performance data?

The output of a nagios plugin (up to nagios 2.x?) is limited to one line. When the plugin produces performance data, it is divided into two parts. The pipe symbol (“|”) is used as a delimiter.

Example check_icmp :

 OK - 127.0.0.1: rta 2.687ms, lost 0% | rta=2.687ms;3000.000;5000.000;0; pl=0%;80;100;;

resulting in the text on the left side of the pipe symbol

 OK - 127.0.0.1: rta 2.687ms, lost 0%

and the performance data

  rta=2.687ms;3000.000;5000.000;0; pl=0%;80;100;;

Performance data is designed for automatic processing. The format is specified within the Developer Guidelines (you'll find an excerpt here) but should be exemplified here nonetheless:

  rta=2.687ms;3000.000;5000.000;0;
   |    |  |    |         |     | |
   |----|--|----|---------|-----|-|----- * label 
        |--|----|---------|-----|-|----- * current value
           |----|---------|-----|-|----- unit ( UOM = UNIT of Measurement ) 
                |---------|-----|-|----- warning threshold
                          |-----|-|----- critical threshold 
                                |-|----- minimum value 
                                  |----- maximum value
                                  

Value marked with * are mandatory. All other values are optional.

Several data series are separated by blanks. The actual data must not contains any blanks. If the label contains blanks, it has to be surrounded by single quotes.

• Perl >= 5.x without additional modules
• RRDtool >= 1.x, better 1.2 but not compulsory
  Attention: installing RRDtool without a packet manager might lead to missing dejavu fonts. If you see graphs without text then this may be the cause.
• PHP >= 5.1.6 for the Webfrontend based on Kohana
• Nagios >= 2.x or Icinga
• Kohana needs the module “mod_rewrite” to be enabled. For details please have a look at the documentation of your web-server specific to your distribution.

PNP is licensed under GPL 2

Development of PNP is organized using github.com. PNP is registered under “PNP4nagios”.

The current stable version of 0.6.x can be found in the download area: github release

Starting with PNP 0.6.x the source code repository was switched from SVN to GIT.

Performance data will be stored in Round Robin Databases using RRDtool. That means that after some time the oldest data will be dropped at the “end” and it will be replaced by new values “at the beginning”.

Various intervals provide for different resolutions. Using the defaults allows to store the data with a resolution of one minute for the last two days, five minutes resolution for ten days, 30 minutes resolution for 90 days and 6 hours resolution for four years. The increasing interval causes averaging of the data which leads to smaller max values. This not an error of PNP.

Using this storage format the size of the files will stay the same over time. Per datasource you will need approx. 400 KB.