Monitoring Plugins wins the fourth BlueHats Prize

We are happy to announce that the winner of the fourth 2024 BlueHats prize is the Monitoring Plugins team, maintainer of the Monitoring Plugins project.

BlueHats prizes are an initiative by the French Interministerial Digital Directorate. They are awarded to maintainers of critical free and open source projects. In 2024 four prizes of € 10 000 each have been given out.

Monitoring Plugins is a long lived project for keeping services running correctly. It defines an interface for writing plugins and ships with more than fifty plugins. The plugins detect problematic statuses such as offline servers, high latency, overheating hardware or faulty storage.

The jury, made up of public officials from ANSSI and DINUM, recognised the central role of Monitoring Plugins in the running of internet services. The members of the Free Software Unit (an OSPO) wish to continue to highlight this type of initiative: discrete projects that are critical to software infrastructures, and maintained by reliable teams over the years.

Holger Weiß, team lead of Monitoring Plugins happily accepted the BlueHats prize. The team is making plans to use the prize for improving the project. Holger writes:

The Monitoring Plugins team is happy to accept the BlueHats prize and honored by the recognition by the jury. As a small corner stone of many IT monitoring solutions we are seldom as visible as big name projects, but are happy to contribute our part to support the infrastructure all of us rely on in our society. Especially as infrastructure is often boring (as it should be), it is not very often visible and usually only receives attention when it fails.

In this spirit we are particulary thankful for people and institutions who care about the small and boring little cogs of the big machinery. This is not self-evident and we appreciate the effort and hope to continue to provide reliable software to the world.

About Monitoring Plugins

Monitoring Plugins started as a side-project to Nagios. The design of Monitoring Plugins was already present in earlier programs by Ethan Galstad. Each plugin is a separate program that checks a specific status. It runs briefly and reports the status to a software that monitors many statuses such as Nagios.

The simple design and collection of plugins made it attractive for other monitoring applications to adopt the same interface. Monitoring Plugins can be written in any programming language because they are separate executables. Most are written in C and Perl.

Due to the simplicity of writing and using the plugins, many services use them and many plugins external to the core project have been created.

Praise for Monitoring Plugins

Anyone could nominate free and open source projects for one of the BlueHats 2024 prizes. Monitoring Plugins was nominated by Lorenz Kästle. He is a systems engineer at NETWAYS and has deployed many monitoring systems and contributed to the project. In his nomination, he writes:

The project and the monitoring plugins developed by it form the building blocks of multiple monitoring systems for IT infrastructure. The range covered by these plugins are basic system metrics and some of the more prominent and most widely used network protocols (HTTP, SNMP, etc.). Although it is not really possible to say where, by whom and how often the Monitoring Plugins are used, it might be hundreds of thousands of individual systems.

However the development time invested to improve the code base, introduce better testing and fix bugs has been rather low in the last years, since no specific entity provides the resources to properly work on the project.

Especially reducing the stack of reported issues and offered code contributions would be a target, but also homogenization of the present code, updated documentation and improvement to the infrastructure (packaging).

A representative of DINUM says:

We know for sure that many public administrations depend indirectly on monitoring plugins: this project is typical of a niche Free Software initiative that helps other tools to remain accurate, here in the monitoring area. We hope that this award will help the maintainers to get more sponsors and direct contributions!

BlueHats prizes for maintainers of critical software

The BlueHats prizes aim to place maintainers of critical open source software in the spotlight. It is a well-known problem in the free and open source world: The benefit of having open source software is enormous but there is not enough attention and resources for maintenance and maintainers.

Monitoring Plugins is critical infrastructure that is widely used and relies on a small group of contributors. The interface is simple, but the tasks that the plugins perform can be hard to perform and has to be efficient. Since so many systems run these programs often, they need to be reliable and safe. The BlueHats prizes seek to encourage users of free and open software to invest in maintenance.