Nagios or Icinga users probably know the problem that neither the default plugin packages (nagios-plugins-basic and -standard) nor the few other plugin packages ship all the plugins you need to monitor your hardware and software properly. And unless you have puppet, cfengine or some other automation software, you probably just start searching plugins on Nagios Exchange, MonitoringExchange or some other machines you are monitoring already.
Your problem shall be solved! nagios-plugins-contrib passed NEW today. It is a collection of various useful plugins, maintained within the Debian Nagios Maintainer Group. So far it contains only 6 plugins (check_email_delivery, check_ipmi_sensor, check_lm_sensors, check_memcached, check_raid, check_rbl), but more are going to come.
To have your favorite plugins added to the package we would like to encourage you to send pull requests, either using github, alioth or your personal repository. Please keep in mind that you’ll be added to the Uploaders of the package automatically to ensure that you keep your plugin updated and in a good shape. See debian/README.source for some instructions on adding new plugins. Unmaintained plugins will be removed! Of course you can also submit bug reports to have a new plugin added, but you have to convince somebody to maintain it for you (or that he wants to use the plugin and needs to maintain it therefore :) ).
We might also also have a similar package in contrib as a lot of commonly used plugins require non-free software, so don’t hesitate to prepare plugins for inclusion in such a package and let us know!
Suggestions and ideas for improvement are always welcome. And so is help to maintain the packages!