Monitoring Windows Servers - Comparing Options

[Cook, Garry]

For the past few years Nagios has been the most important tool for monitoring my network and Linux servers. I now have 'buy in' from the department handling the Windows Servers to at least show them how Nagios can help them to stay on top of issues, without all of the false positive alerts that they get from current tools, which can cause people to want to ignore most issues.

So, my question is, what is the best option for monitoring Windows Servers and why?
An important factor to consider is that I will probably not have Administrative access to any of the Windows Servers that I will be monitoring.

I'm currently considering three options for the reasons shown below (in order of preference):
1) WMI checks
        Pros
        -Complete control of NRPE service on 'my' Windows Server
                (Can this be distributed over two boxes?)
        -Complete control of check commands on Nagios Server
        Cons
        -NRPE service must be run from an account with access to all Windows Servers.

2) Agent checks - NRPE-NT or some other current Windows Agent
        Pros
        -???
        Cons
        -Requires an agent setup and running on every Windows Server
        -No direct control of agents/check commands

3) SNMP based checks
        Pros
        -Complete control over check commands on Nagios Server
        Cons
        -No direct control of SNMP Community Strings/ACL allowing access from Nagios
        -No direct control of SNMP service

How do you do it? Are there any other Pros & Cons that I might be missing? Do you think I should consider a process/utility not listed?

I'm open to suggestions on which agent is best, but I can probably determine this from list archives and testing. At this time I'm more interested in which high-level option would be the best fit.
Perhaps there is a good reason to use more than one of the above options, and I'm just not aware of it yet.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Garry W. Cook, CCNA
Network Systems Specialist
ARCADIS U.S., Inc.

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