Overview
NSCA is an acronym for N agios S ervice C heck A cceptor.
NSCA is a Nagios service that allows you to receive check results from remote machines and applications with Nagios. The check results are received and submitted to Nagios as Passive checks.
This can reduce the load on the Nagios server as it is not initiating the checks and hence only does work when results are received from remote clients.
This can be also be used for remote devices that are not always online, check results are only received when the remote device is able to send them, hence Nagios won't complain about a device it can't contact because it's not actively checking the remote device, it's passively receiving results.
There are two parts to NSCA:
Server
Client
This is the remote device submitting the check result. Usually a third party application like NSClient++ is used as it already has the capability to perform checks on the client and hence utilises a built in module to send NSCA check results back to the Nagios server

For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at:
http://support.nagios.com/forum/
Article ID: 78
Created On: Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 11:37 PM
Last Updated On: Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:27 PM
Authored by: tlea
Online URL: https://support.nagios.com/kb/article/nsca-overview-78.html