Nagios Support Forum

Hi, this is just a question on the way 2 windows checks work, and you can close it after you answer

if you set up a service check, it does not graph the information on the check under that service
but if i instead set it up as a process check, the check gives all kinds of useful information to help debug problems

Was there a reason that checks for a service does not give the same information as a process check?

I'm asking because I'm shutting down sitescope and moving everything into XI, and they have a lot of service checks, which might be better off served as process checks with respect to information collected

thank you in advance

Without knowing for sure which plugin you are using and which Agent / method you are using to poll the Windows system, we can't give a detailed description on the output differences.
But, on most checks that I have seen is when you are checking a service, all they are doing is checking to see if the service is running or not or that a number of them are running.
When checking for processes, some of the checks do the same as the service check but some also return more details on the process like the amount of memory, load, etc.....

That is why they usually show different output.

The following link show various plugins and the output they produce. Take a look at it for more details.
https://support.nagios.com/kb/category.php?id=186

I apologize, I thought I posted that this was the NCPA agent

In the picture below, you can see that I'm using the NCPA "check service" to make sure that remote desktop is running
and then I have two process checks for something that I could have set up as a service check The process check gives detailed information while the service check, just says running

The process check
OK: Process count for processes named fedexclsservice.exe was 1
Processes Matched
PID: Name: Username: Exe: Memory: CPU
-----------------------------------
6100: FedExClsService.exe: FEDX03\\fedexuser: 2.47 % (VMS 0.11 GB, RSS 0.11 GB): 0.00 %

Total Memory: 2.47 % (VMS 0.11 GB, RSS 0.11 GB)
Total CPU: 0.00 %

Vs the service check
OK: TermService is running

could the Service check also give the same details for services?

That agent does what I described earlier.
The service check only checks to see if the service is running and does not produce and performance output so no graph, etc.
The process check returns more details like you already see.

Different check return different data, that is how they were written.

If you want to have added functionality added to the agent, you can go to the NCPA development site and request it.
https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/ncpa/issues