Nagios monitor capabilities

[nanz28v]

We are testing Nagios right now and a different IT team within our company asked us if Nagios can monitor the following Windows items for them. Please verify what Nagios can do and cannot do. I know this is a lot of items and a bit of granular but we want to make Nagios shine in our environment.

o % Processor Time
o Private Bytes for the following Processes:
 w3wp(IIS)
 soss_svr(SOSS)
o Process_% processor time for key process
 w3wp(IIS)
 soss_svr(SOSS)
o Memory_Available Memory
o .NetCLRJit__% time in jit
o .NetCLRLocksandthreads_ContentionRate
o .NetCLRMemory_% time in GC
o .NetCLRSecurity_% time in RT checks
o ASP.Net_Requests Queued
o ASP.Net_worker process restarts
o ASP.NetApplications_Req/Sec
o .NetCLRLocksandthreads_ContentionRate
o ASP.Net_Requests Queued
o Requests Executing
o Request Execution Time
o ScaleOut Session State Provider
 # Total Session Lock Contentions
 Bytes Retrieved / Sec
 Bytes Sent / Sec
 Client Cache Read Hits / Sec
 Client Cache Read Misses / Sec
 Server Create / Update Time
 Server Read Time
 Session Deserialization Time
 Session Serialization Time
o Bytes Total/Sec
o % Network Utilization

[tmcdonald]

Nagios itself does not check anything, technically. The Nagios architecture uses a system of plugins, which a small self-contained (mostly) scripts or programs that Nagios runs and collects the output from. The plugins do the actual checking. So for example check_http would be great for checking a web server, but horrible for checking telnet. It would return the status of the webserver along with some extra information such as respose time and HTTP error code returned.

So in your specific case, the answer is "Yes it is possible, but there may not be a plugin made for it right now"

That said, you can look into a few things:

1.) NCPA (Nagios Cross-Platform Agent) is a service designed to run on a system and report various OS-level metrics such as CPU usage, running services, etc. It's pretty painless to install and should take care a lot of the "Is this service running?" questions.

2.) PowerShell - PS can be used to write plugins in a Windows environment and can be quite extensive. I am not well-versed in PS but I would wager it can cast a wide net for the items NCPA can't get on its own.

Those two should get you most of the way, it's just a matter of writing/finding the right plugin. You can check out our Nagios Exchange to search for plugins people have already written.