My current thoughts on support for getting performance data from the remote page would be to just scrape it from the standard plugin output, which is supported as the body:

PLUGIN OK - Good to go! | time=0.012s;1;10;10;0

I was also thinking about how to add support for receiving as headers, since the other supported aspects of the plugin may be transmitted as headers. My current thoughts are for a header named X-Nagios-Performance which would hold the name=value pair, separated by spaces like the normal plugin and would also allow more than one header with the data to be present:

X-Nagios-Performance: time=0.012s;1;10;10;0
X-Nagios-Performance: count=2;;;50;0 other=4;;;4;0

For Nagios::Plugin::OverHTTP itself, since the remote plugin can provide critical and warning thresholds, I was thinking of allowing for actually changing the status based on that to be made optional by default (because if the remote plugin said the status was OK but yet a performance metric it sent said that it should really be in a WARNING state, by default Nagios would have kept that as OK so I believe that my plugin should honor that as well by default). New options for the plugin would be:

--warning name=threshold
--critical name=threshold
--use-transmitted-thresholds
--override-transmitted-thresholds

The last option --override-transmitted-thresholds would cause the performance data written as the plugin’s output to be changed to match the thresholds given as the plugin’s options. This means a plugin with the given options --override-transmitted-thresholds --critical time=4 would cause the performance data to say time=0.012s;1;4;10;0 instead of time=0.012s;1;10;10;0 (note that this setting does not affect the decision of the final status code).

define command{
        command_name check_over_http
        command_line check_over_http --url=$ARG1$ $ARG2$
        }

This means the following would need to be in a service definition:

define service{
        use                            noncritical-service

        host_name                      server1
        service_description            Connection to MySQL
        notes                          Checks if the server can connect to remote MySQL
        check_command                  check_over_http!http://server1/nagios/check_remote_mysql
        }

As you can see, the check command duplicates the hostname, which is not the way of Nagios plugins. Now With version 0.04 and up, we can have the following definitions:

define command{
        command_name check_over_http
        command_line check_over_http --hostname=$HOSTADDRESS$ --path=$ARG1$ $ARG2$
        }

define service{
        use                            noncritical-service

        host_name                      server1
        service_description            Connection to MySQL
        notes                          Checks if the server can connect to remote MySQL
        check_command                  check_over_http!/nagios/check_remote_mysql
        }