NCPA vs NSClient++

[yybadrou]

Hi Dear Community,

I have a set of different equipments (more than 400 hosts), Linux and windows, some are monitored with NRPE, other with NSClient++. I am working to migrate to the NCPA Client. So my questions are :
- At what point, it becomes mandatory to use NCPA over NSClient
- In a basic monitoring level (CPU, DISK, MEMORY), you think that it is necessary to use an Agent monitoring or not ? Is there an agentless method to perform this basic monitoring?
- In term of security, what Agent provide the best security ?

Thank you !!

[benjaminsmith]

Hi,

Thanks for giving Nagios XI a try! Happy to help you answer any questions you might have. Regarding NCPA and NSClient, here are my recommendations.

1. It's not mandatory but most of the Wizards work with NCPA, and we also have the built-in Agent Deployment feature for NCPA, so this makes installing on a large number of hosts much much easier.

2. NCPA will provide more functionality. Unless you are using SNMP, you'll need a plugin on the remote hosts to run the checks. However, you could set this up agentless on Linux systems checking over an SSH connection. The nice thing about NCPA common checks like CPU, DISK and MEMORY are all built into the API.

https://www.nagios.org/ncpa/help.php

3. NSclient is maintained by another developer/company, and is actively maintained. As far as NCAP goes, it's developed with python, the libraries are well maintained, and we quick to release updates for any known CVE's. If you ever have any concerns feel free to let us know on the forum. NCPA is also an open-source product, you can view the code and post any issues on our GitHub repository as well.

https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/ncpa

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Benjamin