Using SNMP as an alternative to NRPE

[Thomas Sluyter]

Hi all,

For the new Nagios roll-out I'm working on at my current client I've  
run into an interesting dispute. The matter concerns the running of  
remote scripts, to check all kinds of stuff on Nagios client systems.

Why is it that we insist on using NRPE for this? Of course it's very  
practical that there's such a thing as the NRPE daemon and the  
check_nrpe command. It does indeed make things easier for a lot of  
people who lack deep technical insight.

But what is to keep the expert users from using the SNMP daemon for  
this practice?

There's a bunch of factors that have pushed us away from NRPE and  
towards SNMP:
* The SNMP daemon is installed by default on all of our systems.  
AFAIK it's also part of the default install of just about every OS  
installation (with the possible exception of Windows).
* We are currently already using the SNMP daemon to gather  
performance info for MRTG and we will be using the SNMP daemon to  
send traps to Nagios.
* The SNMP daemon can be configured quite easily to run the requisite  
script and binaries. These will be tied to a custom OID and can thus  
be read using some form of check_snmp.
* Not using NRPE means one less configuration file to maintain, one  
less port to open up in firewalls and one less binary to patch and  
upgrade.

Do any of you know of any practical objections to using SNMP as a  
substitute for NRPE? It might be that we're missing something here,  
but to us it looks like a very good choice.

Cheers!


Thomas


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