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New joiners to Centreon might be confused by the use of two similar terms: Plugins and Plugin Packs. This article provides a description of the Centreon Engine and explains how these terms are used.

Centreon is a system that can collect information from many types of devices or cloud services with very little effort.
The flexibility that allows to interface with different devices and the knowledge about how to monitor them are provided by two components: the Centreon Plugins and the Plugin Packs.
While the names are somewhat similar, their roles are very different.
Before explaining "who is who", let's start by defining the role of the Centreon Engine so that you understand which one is used by the Engine, and which one helps you configure the Engine.
 

Centreon Engine

The software component that collects information from cloud-to-edge is the Centreon Engine. In simple terms, the Centreon Engine is a "simple" scheduler. It knows exactly when, at which intervals, and how to execute commands/scripts that collect information from your IT infrastructure.

The Centreon Engine itself is not able to collect information from any network devices/services. However, it knows exactly which commands/scripts to execute (and their corresponding parameters) for every host and/or service.
With that said, the scripts that are executed by the Engine are the ones responsible for the actual "interaction" with the hosts/services themselves. If you don't have these scripts, Centreon is not able to monitor anything!

As long as you follow a certain syntax while replying with information to the Engine, you can even develop your own scripts!
Also, you have to tell the Engine, which scripts need to be run in order to collect information from hosts/services.
 

Centreon Plugins

The Centreon Engine needs to execute the scripts that are capable of "talking" to your devices/services. In our dialect, these scripts are the Centreon Plugins!
Although you can develop your own plugins (compiled binaries or interpreted scripts), Centreon does most of the heavy lifting for you by writing (as of today, more than 500!) plugins that can be used to collect information from printers to Office365 OneDrive usage.

Because these plugins are "regular" computer programs, they can be executed either manually (by you, in a shell with centreon-engine user) or programmatically (by the Centreon Engine, for example). By default, our plugins are installed in the /usr/lib/centreon/plugins/ directory of your Poller and/or Central server.

Plugins are not visible in the Centreon graphical interface. They only collect information from your infrastructure.


Plugin Packs

The Plugin Packs are what makes your life easy while configuring Centreon through the graphical interface. In simple words, the Plugin Packs are made of sets of pre-built configuration containing hosts/services templates and commands.

With the Plugin Packs, you don't have to perform a manual configuration of the Centreon Engine using the graphical interface to tell it exactly which plugin to run in order to collect information from each host or service. You don't have to remember which plugin options need to be used with every host/service check. They've been previously built by Centreon so that you can create new hosts/services with only a few clicks.
Plugin Packs are obviously built to be compatible with the Centreon Plugins.
 

Plugin Packs listed in the Centreon console 

 

Summary

  • Centreon Plugins are scripts that communicate with your IT infrastructure to collect information.
  • Centreon Plugins can be run manually (in a shell with centreon-engine user) or programmatically (by the Centreon Engine, for example).
  • Centreon Plugins are not visible in Centreon's graphical interface.
  • Plugin Packs are basically hosts/services templates that help you save time while configuring Centreon through its graphical interface.
  • Plugin Packs depend on Centreon Plugins to work properly. Centreon Plugins do not depend on Plugin Packs.
  • Plugin Packs are not scripts that can be run in a shell or on-a-schedule by the Centreon Engine.
  • Plugins Packs are templates that - under-the-hood - help you configure the Centreon Engine.

 

 

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Hi,

Another major difference is that Plugins are free (ie: open-source), but Plugin Packs (and obviously Plugin Packs Manager) are not. They require a commercial license. Except if it changed recently, but I don’t think so.

Plugin Packs permit to save some time implementing your hosts and services, but they imply you to use Centreon’s modelization (ie: templating). All the templates have a *-custom version which you can customize to fit your needs. But if you want to keep your Centreon platform full open-source, then you shouldn’t use them at all, but instead write your own templates. The commercial license also is needed for the auto-discovery feature (which is a nice and time saving functionality too).

Personally I regret that Plugin Packs and auto-discovery aren’t open-source. I would prefer all the functionalities to be free, and only pay for support, but it is as it is.

Some other parts of Centreon aren’t open-source too, but I don’t use them so I won’t say anything about them.

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