check_diskio For Linux

check_diskio is an open source, free, simple and POSIX-compatible plugin implemented in Perl for the Nagios IT infrastructure monitoring system. It designed to allow users to effortlessly monitor disk I/O (input/output) on various Linux kernel-based operating systems.

The program has been engineered in such a way that supports systems that run both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. It’s a command-line utility and it features several options, such as the ability to set a device name or mount point, the critical number of sectors, as well as the number of sectors that generate a warning.

Among other command-line options, we can mention the ability to add unit of measurement, to specify the sector size in bytes, to reset the counters, to run in quiet mode and note issue any warnings, to specify unit of threshold, to set the debugging output, and to set the seconds before the plugin times out.

Another interesting feature is the ability to strip partition numbers from the device number, a function that is very useful for HP Smart Array cards.

Among the supported units of measurement, we can mention sectors, bits and bytes. On the other hand, supported units of thresholds include kilo binary, mega binary, giga binary, kilo, mega, and giga.

To install and use the check_diskio program under your Nagios infrastructure, you must download the latest version of the software from Softpedia, save the archive on a location of your choice, extract its contents and open a terminal emulator software.

In the Terminal app, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/check_diskio-3.2.7), run the ‘make’ command to compile the program, and then run the ‘make install’ as root to install it.