We're starting to release some of the Nagios plugins we've written or modified internally for wider use. The first one is a handy tool for checking JSON web services response values via Python 2.4+ utilizing the simplejson module. It's faily simple at the moment but expect threshold and timestamp matching to come in the next few weeks. Follow the updates on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/HubSpot/HubSpot-Nagios-Plugins
This plugin was a fork of work previously done by Peter Kropf, and is hosted at https://github.com/pkropf/Nagio-Plugins/tree/master/json
The main use for this was to create useful status checks on our existing JSON API's (check out docs.hubapi.com for more info on those) through the actual mechanisms they use to deliver normal responses. Other Nagios plugins offer you the ability to check for strings or regular expressions, which does part of the job, but we wanted to make sure the status returned was properly serialized JSON and that it used the same code that serves data to non-monitoring requests. Future improvements mean we can monitor error rates and timing information from the service directly and not have to add circuitous checks on logs or other items through slower aggregation techniques. And of course, better monitioring means better information which leads to better quality software which ultimately leads us to happier customers!