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shylent
Asked: 2009-10-06 01:07:45 +0800 CST

An alternative to NSClient++ for windows-based systems monitoring

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First of all, I am fully aware of the existence of this question.

With that out of the way, - I am looking for something to monitor windows-based systems for metrics, that are impractical to collect via snmp (such as the presence of certain substrings in log files).

I've tried to use NSClient++, however it is extremely underdocumented (even the author admits it), so doing something even remotely non-standard is pure trial-and-error, which is unacceptable in the soon-to-be production environment. On top of that, the plugin CheckDisk.dll is supposedly broken in the latest "stable" release (0.3.6?) and reports incorrect results for the CheckFile2 test.

I have lost hope, really, but, nevertheless, perhaps I am missing something? Perhaps there is a working alternative to NSClient++ out there? Preferrably with a comprehensive documentation.

Either way, what do you use for monitoring windows-based hosts via nagios?

windows

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Out of curiosity, have you tried writing your own script for doing what you want to do?

    NSClient++ is much like NRPE it is a transport for running script on remote server (in this case windows servers). Thus you have a lot of scripts you can run and you can also write your own. In Addition to this it also has some built-in commands (which now days are pretty "ok" documented according to the author (me) if not let me know what is missing) but the "flexibility" comes from scripting if you ask me.

    And yes the CheckDisk had problems in the latest stable release and has (to my knowledge) been fixed since (and 0.3.7 will be out pretty soon which fixes this issue).

    Anyways, sorry for barging in like this, but I played with "google alerts" and got an eamil with this link so I figured I might as well respond :P

    (don't know if this is a double post but I the reply I write before was not here so i am re-posting)

    // Michael Medin

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  2. We use NSClient++ on all of our Windows boxes however there are a number of different versions running, mostly because of the way it crashes on different machines.

    For log checking, it may be easier and safer to do some log shipping and have windows send its log files to a syslog server so you can grep them there. If not, mounting the folder from the linux machine and doing something like

    logtail LOGFILE | grep "String you want" | mail admins

    Is a quick and dirty way around it.

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  3. If you're mainly concerned with pattern-matching in log files, you could use the check_log plugin that comes with the standard Nagios plugins; we use this to check for particular messages in the log files of some of our homemade apps, and it works pretty well for that. Just mount wherever the log files are (or use a syslog server, or one of the various other methods for getting log data from A to B) and tell the plugin what string(s) you're looking for.

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