title: Home menu: 1 --- # The Monitoring Plugins Project We, the [Monitoring Plugins Development Team][team], maintain a bundle of more than fifty standard plugins for [Icinga][icinga], [Naemon][naemon], [Nagios][nagios], [Shinken][shinken], [Sensu][sensu], and other monitoring applications. Each plugin is a stand-alone command line tool that provides a specific type of check. Typically, your monitoring software runs these plugins to determine the current status of hosts and services on your network. Some of the provided plugins let you check local system metrics (such as [load averages][load], [processes][procs], or [disk space usage][disk]), others use various network protocols (such as [ICMP][icmp], [SNMP][snmp], or [HTTP][http]) to perform remote checks. This allows for monitoring a large number of common host and service types. For more specific needs, thousands of community-contributed plugins can be found on sites such as [Nagios Exchange][nagex] or [Monitoring Exchange][monex]. In addition to the core plugins bundle, we maintain a [Perl module][module] that makes it [easy][perl-plugins] to write your own plugin. We also take care of an SNMP MIB used for traps sent from Nagios. Last but not least, we host the [Nagios Plugin Development Guidelines][guidelines]. Our bundle was previously known as the “official” Nagios Plugins package. The [new name][rename] reflects both the success of the plugin interface [originally invented][history] by the [Nagios folks][folks], and the popularity of our package, as the plugins are now used with various other monitoring products as well. You can get the latest releases from the [download page][download]. [team]: team.html "Monitoring Plugins Development Team" [icinga]: https://www.icinga.org/ "Icinga" [naemon]: http://naemon.github.io/ "Naemon" [nagios]: http://www.nagios.org/ "Nagios" [sensu]: http://sensuapp.org/ "Sensu" [shinken]: http://www.shinken-monitoring.org/ "Shinken" [load]: doc/man/check_load.html "check_load" [procs]: doc/man/check_procs.html "check_procs" [disk]: doc/man/check_disk.html "check_disk" [icmp]: doc/man/check_icmp.html "check_icmp" [snmp]: doc/man/check_snmp.html "check_snmp" [http]: doc/man/check_http.html "check_http" [nagex]: http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins "Plugins on Nagios Exchange" [monex]: https://www.monitoringexchange.org/inventory/Check-Plugins "Plugins on Monitoring Exchange" [module]: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Monitoring-Plugin/ "Monitoring::Plugin Module" [guidelines]: doc/guidelines.html "Nagios Plugin Development Guidelines" [perl-plugins]: doc/writing-perl-plugins.html "Monitoring::Plugin Presentation" [rename]: news/new-project-name.html "New Project Name" [history]: http://www.nagios.org/about/history "Nagios (Plugins) History" [folks]: http://www.nagios.org/about/team "Nagios Team" [download]: download.html "Download"