Nagios checks for Polycom GMS global directory entries

I administrate some Polycom video conferencing endpoints which are managed trough an instance of Polycom Global Management System (GMS). The video endpoints also use the Global Directory Service which is provided by the GMS. Some day I experienced problems where the clients could not recieve the entries of the global addressbook. In some cases this was the result of a problem on the GMS system where the addressbook was suddenly empty for some reason.

To identify the source of the problem faster in future I wanted to track the number of entries provided by the global addressbook. Since we use Nagios as monitoring plattform it was clear to write a new plugin for monitoring the number of addressbook entries. Read how I realized that check…