There are various instances where there are values I want to monitor with Nagios, and I don't care as much about the value itself, but rather how it compares to the previous value.

For instance, I wrote one to check the fail counters in OpenVZ. In this case, I didn't care about the value that much, but rather I cared if the value increased. Another example might be switch ports, I would be most interested to get alerted about the change of state of a port (Although perhaps a trap would be better for this one).

For my OpenVZ script, I used a temp file, but I am wondering if there is a better way? Maybe Nagios has some variables that plugins (check scripts) can access that are persistent across checks?