Parsing Nagios status.dat in PHP

If you’re just looking for the script or PHP module, you can get them at: http://github.com/jantman/php-nagios-xml.

A while ago (back in late 2008), I wrote a PHP script that parses the Nagios status.dat file into an associative array. My original use was to output XML which was then read by another script on another server and used for a small custom GUI. It’s a very simple PHP script that just takes the path of the status.dat file (which, obviously, must be readable by the user running the script).

At that time, I was using Nagios v2. Since then, I’ve moved to Nagios v3, and have updated the script to include the ability to parse v3 status.dat files, as well as a function to detect the version of a status file. I also refactored the code so that the parsing functions are all contained in a single file (statusXML.php.inc) which is safe to include in other scripts. The actual statusXML.php file now just includes examples of how to call all of the functions and output XML (though it is equally useful to output the serialized array, or use it directly).

Since I posted my script online, two people have been kind enough to send back their modifications:

• Artur Krzywański modified the original (r4) version of statusXML.php to allow selection of the keys to be returned.
• Whitham D. Reeve II of General Communication, Inc., who needed higher performance for a very large status file, rewrote my script in C as a PHP module.

Both of these generous contributions have been included in my Github repository as of the current commit. Unfortunately, due to my delay in putting my Nagios3 code into svn, both of these contributions are Nagios v2 only.

As time permits, I plan on merging Artur’s changes into the current version of statusXML.php.inc. Unfortunately, C isn’t one of my strong points, but I plan on also updating Whitham’s PHP module code to work with Nagios3 as soon as possible.

Stay tuned for updates, and thanks to both gentlemen for contributing their work. I’m always interested in hearing how people are using my code, and how they are making it better.

Also: While I added this project to Nagios Exchange, and plan on adding it to Monitoring Exchange, I don’t always keep those sites up to date (I can’t access Nagios Exchange right now, and who knows if I’ll have time to update it tomorrow). I strongly recommend directly checking out from Git at https://github.com/jantman/php-nagios-xml.