Nagios Support Forum

Can NCPA agent using active checks be centrally managed and use the central plugin repository the way NRDS agent can:?
1) "The NRDS client configuration can be managed centrally by the NRDP server, or more easily through the NRDS Config Manager Component in Nagios XI."
2) "Also, any plugins you want to run on the client machines should be loaded into the appropriate plugin sub-directory on the Nagios server. The root is: /usr/local/nrdp/plugins"
Both from https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... h_NRDS.pdf

I see that if I use NCPA with passive checks then the answer is Yes with the following settings:
UPDATE_CONFIG=1
UPDATE_PLUGINS=1

But what about the case when I only use active checks?

Active checks responding to API queries has nothing to manage. Active checks using Nagios plugins on the NCPA host require the plugins to be managed. In and of itself, NCPA does not offer this capability. You could easily build an NCPA agent script that does an rsync to copy all the other scripts, which you then schedule like any other service check, and execute every hour or six or 24. This way, the client is pulling updated Nagios plugins at regular intervals (and your script catches and reports errors) and you can always force it to run whenever you want to if you need a faster update for some reason.

This is a variation of what we do.

eloyd is correct, NCPA doesn't currently have that functionality, I agree that it would be a great feature, there has been a feature request already created for this:

https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/ncpa/issues/65