Thanks so much to the needs of our customers and the great acceptance by the community of our plugins, and their continued feedback, we publish the  version 0.4b of our plugin to check memory consumptions en UNIXlike systems, check_unix_mem_usage.

We have extended the features of the plugin to make it more versatility and flexibility. These two new features offer the following qualities:

• Allows to choose whether you want to return in the performance data a metric with maximum system RAM.
• Allows to check the memory based on percentages but get the output in the desired units.

Thanks to these improvements we can make more interesting and comfortable our checks. On the one hand we can obtain performance data that allow us to draw graphs in which we will always have a clear reference to the top of RAM in the system. And on the other hand, we can plan checks on our systems without having to be aware of the existing RAM in each. On the above, for example, we would create a check that returning the memory values ​​in a given unit and establish warning or criticality states based on whether it exceeds the memory usage by 80% or 90%, respectively, allowing expand or reduce the memory available on the system without have to worry about adjusting the thresholds for the check.

The plugin is programmed in Perl and is compatible with Nagios 3.x (Embedded Perl). It comes with a README file in which is described in more detail the operation of this and its requirements. As always, the plugin can be downloaded from our website and more information is available through Nagios Exchange.

Again, we turn to enter the area of UNIX and release a new update of our plugin to check memory consumptions en UNIXlike systems, check_unix_mem_usage.

It is vital to our system, have a clear vision of its use of memory. Thus, besides the features already offered by previous versions of our plugin we have made improvements to make checks with greater precision and greater flexibility. The complete set of features of the plugin is as follows:

• It can check not only the overall memory consumption, but also the application memory consumption, the cache consumption and the swap consumption. Nowadays operating systems tend to use the max available memory over disk cache, for this reason, even when the system needs few resources, the memory usage percentages are close to 100%. This is the reason why we consider the total memory consumption a poor indicator.
• It allows checkings based on percentage of total.
• It can use units, Bytes, Kibibytes, Mebibytes, Gibibytes and Tebibytes. Units based on IEEE 1541 standard.
• It support checks based on thresholds or ranges.
• It allows to choose which levels of memory to check.

Also included is an improved functionality. This is the previous lack power used to estimate the percentage allocated to disk cache.

Plugin is Nagios 3.x (ePN) compatible. Attached README file includes plugin related information. It can be downloaded from our website or from Nagios Exchange.

This week we publish the first version change in one of our plugins. Thanks to the community of users who have trusted in our developments for their Nagios system we could get a bug in the plugin to check the memory status on Unix system, the check_unix_mem_usage.

As soon as we have received notice of the error we got down to work and we have corrected this bug and and two more that we have found in way. So, if you seemed functional the plugin, you will now be safer.

Thank you for trusting us. And, you can find the update both our downloads section and in the Nagios Exchange.

Our sincere thanks to José Renato Attab Braga.