NRPE vs NCSA

[Marco Ramos]

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 12:28 +0100, Hari Sekhon wrote:
> Marco Ramos wrote: 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 12:14 +0100, Hari Sekhon wrote:
> >   
> > > I want to extend my nagios configuration to cover things like disk space 
> > > on servers etc so I need to evaluate which is better for this purpose: 
> > > NRPE or NCSA.
> > >     
> > 
> > IMHO, you should also consider SNMP. 
> > 
> > Best regards,
> > Marco Ramos
> > 
> >   
> > > I believe that looking at the (very) brief doc that comes with Nagios 
> > > that NRPE is a server side executor which tells the remote host "go run 
> > > this plug-in and pass the result back to me", whereas NCSA executes 
> > > itself on the host side and then sends the result to a listening NCSAd 
> > > on the monitoring server running Nagios.
> > > 
> > > So it comes down to active server initiated test or passive client 
> > > initiated test.
> > > 
> > > While NCSA would reduce load slightly (probably not noticeably though I 
> > > expect), NRPE would allow for a more centralised way of doing things, 
> > > especially since I keep my entire nagios config under svn and like to be 
> > > able to redeploy it centrally.
> > > 
> > > Does anybody have any advice as to which I should go with? What have you 
> > > used and what are your experiences of this?
> > > 
> > > -h
> > > 
> > >     

> >   
> seeing as I've never used snmp (it's on my todo list) I'd need a bit
> more of a guideline than that... How would you get check results, what
> would you run on the client, what would you run on the server?
> 

As I see it, SNMP has a major advantage: it's a industry standard. For
instance, if you also monitor routers or other network equipment, you
can't install nrpe or nsca on it.

There are also other advantages. There are many servers/applications
(jabber, squid, etc, etc) that have SNMP built-in support, so that you
can use that you can monitor a lot of things with SNMP.

Other advantage is the fact that you can use SNMP not only with Nagios,
but also with stats application (like Cacti or other rrdtool based
application ) which greatly reduces the ammount of software you'll have
to install on your servers.

It's really simple to start using SNMP. Take a look at Net-SNMP
(http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net). After understanding how it works, you
just have to identify the OIDs of the things you want to monitor and
make some simple scripts to monitor them. For instance, I use perl
scripts with the Net::SNMP module on my Nagios server to check disk
space, load average and all that kind of stuff on my monitored servers. 

HTH,
Marco Ramos

> -h
> 
> -- 
> Hari Sekhon
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
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