Nagios Core to manage multiple distributed clients

[serrix]

Hi,
We're looking at setting up a centralised Nagios core instance to manage multiple servers at each of our client sites using NRDP. I use Nagios Core at home to monitor my personal web servers etc and have used Nagios in work situations, but not in this way and not on windows systems so was hoping to clarify if it would meet our requirements before spending a lot of time getting this going.

We want to have as small a footprint on each of our client sites and the majority of the servers are Windows.
I'll put below our optimal requirements, can someone please confirm which ones Nagios meets but also if there are valid alternatives?

I imagine that we would set up a small virtual server (with NRDP) which performs active and passive checks, including WMI checks and reports to a remote Nagios core instance over standard open ports such as HTTPS etc. Is this the "best" way to go?

In the case above, would we need to manage configuration files on both the remote central nagios server and the local (client site) nagios proxy? I've found an article which describes setting up a similar scenario with thie caveat.

Is there any plugin which allows us to install a windows client to act as a Nagios proxy as in the first query? (for small clients without a virtual environment)

With a small virtual nagios server with NRDP installed, can we perform agentless WMI checks against windows servers? (or are there any other agentless WMI options?)

Can we give our clients access to the Nagios web interface but limit their ability to simply see the current status of the hosts and services in their host group?

Is there any plugin which would allow us to scan a network to generate a list of checks? (or do we manually have to check up checks for every server and network device?)

Thank you for any help you can give with this.
Kind regards,
Serrix

[sreinhardt]

I imagine that we would set up a small virtual server (with NRDP) which performs active and passive checks, including WMI checks and reports to a remote Nagios core instance over standard open ports such as HTTPS etc. Is this the "best" way to go?

Best, is always hard to answer, however this is a pretty great way to do it, and likely how or very similar to how I would set it up.

In the case above, would we need to manage configuration files on both the remote central nagios server and the local (client site) nagios proxy? I've found an article which describes setting up a similar scenario with thie caveat.

Yes you would need to manage both, and hosts\services will need to have the same names.

Is there any plugin which allows us to install a windows client to act as a Nagios proxy as in the first query? (for small clients without a virtual environment)

You could use nsclient with nsca to passively report from a single windows machine back to your remote nagios box, centeralizing all the other machines sending nsca data to that single host that acts as a proxy for nagios.

With a small virtual nagios server with NRDP installed, can we perform agentless WMI checks against windows servers? (or are there any other agentless WMI options?)

Yes you can with check_wmi or other plugins available on exchange.

Can we give our clients access to the Nagios web interface but limit their ability to simply see the current status of the hosts and services in their host group?

You could either give them access to the local nagios instance at their site and they would only be able to see those hosts\services or make contacts on your global server where they are a contact for only their own hosts\services\groups. This would allow them to only see their own items as well.

Is there any plugin which would allow us to scan a network to generate a list of checks? (or do we manually have to check up checks for every server and network device?)

I do not know of one, aside from auto-discovery wizard in XI. However this is really just a port checker and does not actually validate the service is working as expected.

[serrix]

Great, thanks for your help.