BackUPS with Nagios

In order to rule out a crap power infrastructure as the cause for some naughty server behaviour on a client site, it was suggested I should stick a UPS on said server, to make sure that at least the input power would be clean.

In a confusion of Andys I found a recommendation for the APC BackUPS CS 500, so that is what I got and installed.

With apcupsd installed on Debian Etch, the UPS is immediately detected and it "just works".

I wanted to monitor it via nagios though, but I couldn't find any scripts that use the apcaccess tool to interface with nagios, so I created one in PHP. It simply runs the apcaccess binary and parses the output from that command into something that nagios can handle.