Scheduling multiple service checks in Nagios

Just like most Nagios administrators out there I am often required to add multiple hosts in Nagios monitoring which is quite simple task. But it takes a little while, sometimes longer, for Nagios to schedule checks for all the newly added hosts and services.

To make the life easier for us Nagios developers had been kind enough to provide us a command to do this programmatically.

check_windows_processes.pl - Nagios Plugin to monitor multiple Windows processes

Recently I was required to monitor multiple SQL Server processes on a Windows box. Nagios comes bundled with a very cool utility called check_snmp_process which is the ultimate choice for such requests. Unfortunately, it could monitor only one process at a time, so monitoring five processes would mean five different service check definitions, five different checks at five different intervals. Sounds too much of work, isn't it? Inspired by check_snmp_storage, another ultra-cool utility by the same author, I decided to write my own plugin to monitor multiple Windows processes in one run and came up with check_windows_processes.pl