difference between nrpe-nt and nsclient?

[Greg Vickers]

Hello Cam,

Cam wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I need to monitor some windows boxen (primarily win 2003 i think), for
> the standard stuff (disk space, cpu, blah), and more importantly to
> make sure a certain process is running at all times (it's not a
> service, just a process).  I have no problem doing this sort of thing
> on *nix, but i'm not quite so familiar w/ the wild world of windows. 
> I did a quick google search and came across two different beasts that
> both look like they could do the job quite well: nsclient, and
> nrpe_nt.  Now the question is... what are the differences between the
> two?  I understand that nrpe_nt is mostly just a port of the standard
> nrpe (which i have read about, but have not yet had the occasion to
> use), whereas nsclient appears to be written from the ground up (and
> apparently more dated?).  I was just wondering if people w/ experience
> could tell me what (or hasn't) worked for them, and whether or not one
> of these is the more "standard" approach.

OK, both packages will do what you want to do so you could implement 
either one, depending on which one you would be more comfortable with or 
which you find easier to deploy in your environment (given SLAs, 
in-house best practise, phase of the moon, etc) RTFM and make a choice.

There are a few other options, on Nagios Exchange - 
http://www.nagiosexchange.org. (Click the Categories link from the front 
page, NSClient and NRPE_NT are both in the Check Plugins -> Windows area.)

As pointed out, you could use SNMP to retrieve this information. Here's 
my description of the differences between NRPE_NT and NSClient:

NRPE_NT: Nagios Remote Process Executor for NT - will collect the output 
of programs that run in your win32 environment and return information. 
NRPE will collect that output and send it to your Nagios host. This 
gives you a lot of flexibility as you can write your own scripts (.bat, 
.vbs, .asp or whatever (haha!)) to get any kind of information you want. 
(There are a stack of pre-built executables that will run in your win32 
environment in the Check Plugins -> Windows -> NRPE Plugins area.)
(What actually happens is the Nagios server asks the NRPE client on the 
Nagios server to initiate a connection to your Windows host with NRPE 
server on it, once the connection is established, the NRPE client asks 
the NRPE server to run an executable on the Windows host, the NRPE 
server collects the information and returns it to the NRPE client.)

NSClient: (legacy name) NetSaint Client - a win32 executable that runs 
as a service and can retrieve all of the above information you require. 
(IMHO, easier to implement than NRPE_NT - you only have to install one 
executable on your windows hosts, rather than many.) However NSClient is 
not as flexible as NRPE_NT.

HTH,
-- 
Greg Vickers
Project Manager, IT Security
Information Technology Services
Queensland University of Technology
L12, 126 Margaret St, Brisbane

Phone: (07) 3864 9536
Mobile: 0410 434 734
Email: g.vickers at qut.edu.au
IT Security web site: http://www.its.qut.edu.au/itsecurity/

CRICOS No. 00213J


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