@GWicke, this is great! My background for this ask is:

1. I would love to be able to write specs like the Swagger pet store[0] (and other) examples, which I assume to be canonical, and end up with something that looks standard but still keeps all the great test automation!
2. The ability to specify models seems of great value for many reasons. A couple are the ability to specify optional and typed properties, which I don't think x-amples supports.

[0] https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-spec/blob/master/examples/v2.0/yaml/petstore-expanded.yaml

In general, I'm much in favour of de-duplicating effort. In fact, ideally the services' code bases would be Swagger-driven, so that when you add a route, you don't need to remember to add it somewhere else as well.

In this particular instance, though, that would mean modifying the nagios checker script to parse the entire spec and implement most Swagger semantics, so I'd welcome @Joe's opinion on this one before taking any action.