Would be useful to have this functionality in place. Is there a plan to have this fixed ?

FTR the plugin has basically been abandoned, and it never was used much anyway. There's currently only ~4200 external monitor jobs recorded despite having been around for a decade.

Hi Daniel, I'm curious if this plugin is abandoned, if you are aware of an alternative? I'm using it to monitor long running backup scripts, and running those directly through a Jenkins build by running the bash script through it causes the jenkins server to lock up occasionally as it runs out of memory. (It's a script to tar several tens of millions of files taking up hundreds of GBs, takes about 50+ minutes to run to bash command that runs the tar)

No alternative I know, just saying there's little to chance of the plugin seeing further development given its sad adoption stats. Despite being bunded for a decade or so, there's only ~4200 jobs total

I do wonder about the side effects you're describing though. Should probably be isolated, made reproducible, happen on an agent and not Jenkins master (https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Jenkins+Best+Practices) and reported as a bug against core.

Even when the job runs without going through Java/jenkins, it still causes the server to become unresponsive at times, so I think it may just be a resource starvation issue rather than anything specific with Jenkins.