Nagios Support Forum

Hi Group,

I'm new to Nagios core. Installation when pretty smooth on a centos 6.3 box.

Now that I have a base setup, I'm wondering what kinds of addon's might be considered by the group as "must haves" for windows.

Also, can nagios core monitor windows services, disk space, and disk i/o without any addons? Does it just require a windows login in order to check these?

Also, have a few HPUX server would like to monitor as well, are addons required here as well to go beyond just ping?

Oh, and I notice there are a few autodiscover addons, any recommendations on which is the best to use?

Basically, just looking to be steered in the right direction as far as a couple of downloads/addons to get me started.

Thanks.

Every person will have their favourites I think, but for Windows monitoring my preference is definitely to use nsclient++ as a windows agent and then communicate with it via check_nrpe or check_nt.

http://www.nsclient.org/nscp/
http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Ad ... or/details

At first the relationships can be a bit confusing, NRPE is both a plugin for checking *nix/windows (a communication protocol essentially) and an agent for *nix. This approach requires no windows accounts, just the agent installed and configured. NSClient has a bunch of standard checks built-in for CPU, Memory, Disk usage, etc. It can also check the Windows event log or WMI counters and run scripts locally on the box. In short... it's fairly powerful.

Alternatively you can use check_wmi_plus to do your monitoring if you want to go agent-less using a standard windows log on to access WMI counters. There are no shortage of ways to skin the windows monitoring cat.

There are a fairly large number of people who will swear by check_mk for monitoring, though personally I haven't had cause to try it out yet... but it's easily one of the most popular (and most complex) plugins around.

As far as HPUX goes... that's a little harder... there are unofficial builds of the NRPE agent for specific versions of HPUX but they are both hard to find and completely unsupported. HPUX is the one OS that really doesn't get much love on the monitoring support front.

To the best of my knowledge there is no "preferred" auto-discovery solution that most people will swear by, I think a lot either end up using puppets tools or end up writing their own.

Hopefully this helps!

I would like to suggest pnp4nagios for perfdata graphing. Near vital in my opinion. Another good addition is nagiosql. If offers a web-based config utility and stores the nagios configs in a database. Word of warning though, both of these addons can be a bit technical to setup correctly.