Updating from NSClient++ to NCPA

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bighorton
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 12:16 pm

Updating from NSClient++ to NCPA

Post by bighorton »

Apologies in advance, as this may have been answered or may be blindingly obvious in a way that I'm blind about, or my google-foo is failing to find.

tldr: Do I have to manually rebuild all host/service entries in Nagios to use NCPA, or can I point my existing NSClient++ entries at NCPA instead by updating them in some way?

We are currently running NagiosXI Enterprise monitoring hundreds of hosts and thousands of services. Most all of these were added to Nagios using the NSClient++ wizard, and have been running fine (sometimes for years!).

I understand that Nagios use of NSClient++ has been deprecated (although I can't seem to google-up an official announcement of that), and as such I'm looking at the process of moving to NCPA.

Updating our various hosts (removing NSClient++ and installing NCPA) I can do - not worried about that.

My concern is, what do I need to do within Nagios itself to connect my existing host entry to the new client - All references I've found basically just say "Run the NCPA Wizard" - which is fine - but I really do not want to spend the time to manually run the NCPA wizard several hundred times. (Total of 595 hosts, 3182 services of which probabaly 15% are custom entries)

We are running fully licensed Nagios XI, although we apparently don't have whatever license is needed to use the "Bulk Modification Tool" and I'm not sure if that would work for this anyway.

Any suggestions or pointers to available documentation on this part of the update process would be highly appreciated!
kg2857
Posts: 234
Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2023 5:48 pm

Re: Updating from NSClient++ to NCPA

Post by kg2857 »

I've been dreading switching from nrpe and nsclient to ncpa myself. I haven't done it.
I'd look into using ansible or pstools to install the agent on windows.
Assuming your host checks are like mine and use check_ping or check_icmp, they wouldn't change.
Services that use plugins would probably need to be changed to however/whatever ncpa uses to define commands.
Services that use nsclient internal checks will need to be redone.
All the services will need to be converted to use the check_ncpa commandrather than check_nrpe or check_nt.

If you have lots of services defined that do the same thing, the only difference being the host (like ones created via wizards), I'd try to convert to a single service. I'd also move to using templates but that's another story.
kg2857
Posts: 234
Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2023 5:48 pm

Re: Updating from NSClient++ to NCPA

Post by kg2857 »

I found this for running a plugin from ncpa.
https://support.nagios.com/kb/article/n ... a-722.html
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