winRM support

[tmattingly]

Hello,

Does Nagios XI have support for winRM? If so, whats the plugin and/or perferably Wizard that will work with Monitoring Windows servers?

Tom

[scottwilkerson]

As far as I am aware there aren't any plugins for winRM, but Nagios XI does support a wide variety of monitoring options through WMI, SNMP as well as agent based such as NCPA or NSClient++ both of which allow you to run your own plugins that can be .vbs or .ps1 scripts

[tmattingly]

Any plans to support winRM or on a feature timeline?

Tom

[dwhitfield]

If you can write a powershell script for your winrm, you should be able to use it.

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf doesn't mention winrm at all, but it does give the framework for running non-check commands on Windows.

I don't know if you are primarily a Windows admin or Linux admin, but it does look like you might be able to bypass NSClient on the Windows machine if you are more comfortable with Linux: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/ ... ndows.html. If you wanted to go that route, you'd be looking at https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... h_NRPE.pdf as your framework.

[mcapra]

It's worth mentioning that winRM is using WMI for all it's measurements anyway. Might as well cut out the middleman and go with WMI directly unless there's substantial security concerns.

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf

[dwhitfield]

It's worth mentioning that winRM is using WMI for all it's measurements anyway.

Thanks @mcapra!

This brings up a good point to clarify. I was making the assumption you wanted to use the management part of winRM, but you don't actually say that. If all you want to do is monitor Windows, then there are certainly a lot of options for you.

[tmattingly]

Yes, you are correct. I only want to monitor Windows not execute scripts. Primarily Disk space. One of my fellow coworker wants to use WinRM since SNMP is deprecated in Windows 2016. Though I did ask him if WinRM is supported in 2008 and he wasn't sure.

But I would rather use SNMP for everything but it sounds like its unavailable in Windows 2016.

[dwhitfield]

it sounds like its unavailable in Windows 2016.

It's available. MSFT just doesn't want people to use it because people find it complicated (and thus end up with insecure settings).

"On Windows Server you'll have to click Next in the Add Roles and Features Wizard until you reach the Features sections where you can install the SNMP Service. After installing the SNMP service, configure it appropriately. So, run services.msc as administrator and navigate to the properties of the SNMP service. Choose Automatic as startup type to have the service always running, even after turning your computer off and on again. For monitoring purposes, you should also check all services on the Agent tab to have all SNMP values available. Don't forget to adjust security parameters like the community string and the IP/host filter list to your security compliances! For example, add the community name public with READ ONLY rights and accept SNMP packets from at least the address of your monitoring server." There's screenshots at https://www.paessler.com/blog/how-to-en ... ing-system

WinRM was first available in Windows XP, though Server 2008 and Server 2016 do use different versions of the protocol. As already mentioned, if you want to do it the MSFT way, WMI is really the way to go.

[tmattingly]

Thats good to know. So one last question. Just for monitoring then how does Nagios support winRM (again for just monitoring)? Is it through the NSCLIENT++?

Tom

[mcapra]

NSClient++ or NCPA could be leveraged generally to execute scripts on a Windows system. You could write scripts to do your WinRM stuff, then configure it in NSClient++ or NCPA to be later called by Nagios XI. Nagios XI doesn't really "support" WinRM as a simple configuration wizard, but you can allow Nagios XI to execute arbitrary scripts on your Windows machine with minimal configuration using one of the aforementioned agents. In this case, writing the script to do WinRM things would be most of the work.

As WinRM is just a glorified HTTPS wrapper for WMI, it probably wouldn't be too much work to add WinRM authentication to check_wmi_plus (the plugin Nagios XI uses for WMI checks). But that functionality doesn't exist currently.