• Question: Why is there no -H / –hostname option?
• Answer: Because check_multi doesn't need any.
  check_multi is a pure local plugin. It is normally called directly on the monitored server and only needs a adapted config file.
  If you want to specify hostname options within this config file, you can use either localhost on the monitored server or - if you call the plugin on the Nagios server itself - Nagios variables like $HOSTNAME$ which will be interpreted by check_multi.
  Another way is to specify variables via command line using the --set-Option.

• Question: Is check_multi EPN capable?
• Answer: No! The EPN implementation in Nagios is not easy to maintain in terms of debugging and quality control.
  To be honest - I spent too much time into making check_multi and EPN happen .

• Question: Where can I find examples?
• Answer: For the first try please have a look at the contributed command file. Another example can be found on the process views page.

• Question: I'm using the HTML output option (-r 2). But extinfo.cgi only shows a pile of HTML-Tags instead of the correct HTML output.
• Answer: For the HTML output set the option escape_html_tags=0 in your cgi.cfg. See also the report options

Note: if cgi.cfg settings are changed, no Nagios restart is required. Changes will get into effect immediately after a browser reload

• Question: Why does check_multi not work with NSCA?
• Answer1: NSCA is not multiline capable. It parses until it finds the first newline and then stops. Since check_multi highly depends on newlines this is a complete show stopper. We have to wait for a redesign of NSCA.
• Answer2: Actually it does . When you use the HTML output option -r 2 no newlines are used and NSCA will work fine.

• Question: How does check_multi find its child plugins? Do I have to specify the fill path?
• Answer: There is a clear defined order.
  1. check_multi first looks into the default libexec directory, normally the same directory where check_multi is located
  2. If this is not standard it can be specified via the --libexec option.
  3. Then the nagios users PATH is searched.
  4. If anything else fails the location of a plugin can be specified with its full path.

• Question: Why does check_multi discard performance data?
• Answer: Check_multi collects the performance data of multiple plugins and sources. Invalid perfdata could also invalidate other plugins perfdata, therefore it has to be sanitized.

• Question: What does [perfdata discarded …bad uom ','] mean?
• Answer: Your LANG settings are incorrect - please use LANG=C or other LANG locale which provides proper '.'

• Question: How can I get need root permissions for the execution of a plugin?
• Answer: Basically this is the same procedure as for the execution each other plugin. The best method is to execute the command via sudo. For that you have to prepend the command line in the cmd file by sudo and adopt the sudoers configuration /etc/sudoers.