Best Practices for Monitoring Remote Windows Hosts

[jonathanbaird]

Hi,

Could somebody please assist me here. I'm fairly new to Nagios but have managed to get this set up in my organisation and I'm currently monitoring around 25 hosts with around 200 services. I would like some clarification on remote monitoring if I can please. Currently I have set up another Nagios server (VM) at another customer site to monitor their servers (mainly Windows) locally. I am aware of NRPE but I am struggling to determine what is the best way of setting this up. I have installed NSClient++ and this works fine locally, I can also get this to work remotely by forwarding port 12489 to the Windows server, the problem with this is there are 9 servers on site and I cannot see a way to change the listening port on the NSClient++ software so I can only ever monitor one server at a time. I have installed NRPE on their Nagios server and can monitor this using port 5666 fine, everything is OK here but it is the Windows machines I am not sure on. are two Nagios servers required or can I do all this from just one!? I'd like to be able to monitor multiple Windows servers at multiple sites from 1 Nagios instance - am I asking too much!?

I've stumbled across nrpe_nt for Windows and NRPE for Linux but from what I have read, NSClient++ has since replaced nrpe_nt. Could anyone possible shed any light on this please as I'm a little unsure.

Thank you.

[lmiltchev]

You can monitor as many Windows box as you need via check_nt or check_nrpe, for example:

Code: Select all

./check_nt -H <client ip> -s <password> -p 12489 -v <variable to check>
./check_nrpe -H <client ip> -p 5666 -c <command>

You can change the "default" ports for check_nt and check_nrpe in the NSC.ini or nsclient.ini. I am not familiar with "nrpe_nt", but it doesn't seem to be a popular solution.

[jonathanbaird]

Perfect - up and running.

Thank you.

[tmcdonald]

Closing as solved.