NRPE: Unable to read output

This one was a real facepalm moment, but I thought I’d share in case anyone else runs into the same thing.

I’ve been working on migrating from Nagios to Icinga2. One of the services I monitor is whether or not a given host has any available yum updates. This service, which I label check_yum, worked on all my hosts except for the Icinga2 host. All the other services monitored on that host were working, but check_yum returned an error:

NRPE: Unable to read output

I tried running the test manually on the Icinga2 host:

/usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H localhost -c check_yum
NRPE: Unable to read output

I checked to make sure NRPE was listening, in this case via xinetd:

lsof -i

I checked the service definition to see what script/plugin NRPE runs:

cat /etc/nrpe.d/check_yum.cfg
command[check_yum]=/usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_updates -w 0 -c 10 -t 60

I tried to run that manually and…the file /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_updates did not exist.

I installed the corresponding yum package:

sudo yum install nagios-plugins-check-updates

Now it works! It was a reminder to myself to check the basics before trying to troubleshoot network issues.