Monitor Image displays on multiple Screens

[nagwindmon]

hello all,
I have a number of Display screens throughout the building showing advertising images, nothing fancy, plain screens are just scrolling thru 5 to 10 images. Each screen connected to a windows run pc, where those images being are being kept and updated as needed. So I was just wondering if there is a way for Nagios to just monitor images on actual display screens, detect and send alert if screen is blank, no images are shown.

thank you

[slansing]

Well, is it possible to monitor this? Likely yes, do I have any ideas on how to accomplish that? I mean, it depends on what side you actually want to check, you could of course monitor those folders to see if the files exist, but that's not going to tell you if someone turned off a screen. What types of screens are these? Do they have an embedded OS or an API you can reach wirelessly? You need to think of the technology used with the screens or what is displaying through them. If you can, from those systems, find a way to check if the screens are down, then you can probably monitor it, however, the screens themselves are separate hardware that you can likely not check in the same way. Perhaps your graphics card spits out an error if the display device cannot be reached, and logs that somewhere?

[nagwindmon]

thank you slansing for prompt reply...
yes, screens themselves are separate hardware, those are NEC/Samsung display screens attached to Lenovo TinyPC running Win OS
Let me install NSClient++ Agent and see what would be available to monitor beside CPU, Memory usage, Disk space

[slansing]

Yeah it's going to be a bit difficult to find the right metric to monitor for this, unless you already have a way of telling that the screens are not displaying properly besides actually looking at them. The other options you will have with nsclient++ will be custom scripts, which is likely what you'd have to use to monitor this, or windows performance counters.