Setting up nagios3 to send prowl notifications

Updated 27.i.2010 to reflect mig5's corrections

I spent a few minutes today setting up our nagios install at work to page me via prowl, instead of an email->sms gateway. Why? Because I'm cheap, that's why - don't like paying for any more texts than I must. I ran into a few gotchas, so I thought I would briefly document the process. First, you must download the perl script that will send prowl notifications. Next, you will have to install the Crypt::SSLeay and LWP::UserAgent library for perl, so it can access https URLs. Now, try it out to be sure it works: You should get a 'Notification successfully posted.' message. (and a popup on your phone, of course!) If the script isn't working, you'll have to figure out the reason, because nagios depends on it. Once you've ironed all that out, it's time to configure nagios! First, you need to set up your contact information. Edit whichever file you keep your contacts in, and modify an existing record, or add a new one, similar to this: It is very important that you leave the underscore in front of the _prowl_apikey variable, as Nagios' custom variables depend on it. Next, you'll need to add the custom prowl notification commands. Edit the appropriate file, and add these commands: If your perl binary doesn't live in /usr/bin, be sure to give the correct path. (run 'which perl' to find this out if you don't know) If you try to run the prowl.pl script directly, (without using the system perl binary) nagios uses its own perl interpreter, and you'll get an error similar to this in the nagios logs: If you have any trouble, check the nagios debug logs, (you may need to turn up the nagios debug level) and try to run the command it's producing as the nagios user.