What the best way to monitor Windows?

[Sandra Bonus]

Ok, so it sounds like there might be 3 "best" ways to monitor Windows in general.
I will have to check them out in detail before deciding which way to go. I do note that the following though from reading about them -


1. Checkwmiplus
	* Looks like I don't need to install anything on my Windows servers (a nice advantage). 

	* Has lots of checks available.

	* Looks like it will be the easiest of the 3 to get started with (yet to be proven)
	* Requires the linux version of wmic (doesn't look too hard to get going)
	* The newest of the methods

2. nsclient++
	* Has been around a while (maybe the longest of the three methods), possibly making it the most proven method.

	* Needs an agent installed on Windows.

	* Has lots of checks available.
	* Checks have to be configured in 2 places (Nagios and the Windows host).
	* Can possibly do a little bit more than checkwmiplus since it has an agent installed

3. check_mk
	* Needs an agent installed on Windows
	* Needs configuration installed on Windows (can't quite work that one out yet)
	* Seems to have some magic auto-check creation (sounds good, but what if I don't want to check everything it finds - yet to be worked out)
	* Looks like this one will be the most work/complexity to get started with
	* Looks like it will perform the best for large installations, but for smaller installations it probably does not matter. This looks like a trade-off between complexity and performance. I wonder how many hosts/services you need to make it worth while?
	* There looked like a bit of an ugly config where you have to manually run some command (lodctr /s:counters.ini) to get some checks to work? Yuk!
	* Does some magic with my Nagios config. Do I really want some script playing around with my config? Might limit me in the future with upgrades etc as Check_mk will have to support whatever version of Nagios I use.


Hey, if I've got any of this wrong please correct me




________________________________
From: Toonz IT <it.toonz at gmail.com>
To: Nagios Users List <nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net>
Cc: Sandra Bonus <mrsbonus1 at yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, 4 August 2011 9:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] What the best way to monitor Windows?



NSClient++ works fine us too.... 

with custom commands like these you can monitor disk space usages also....which was one of the main requirements for us!

define service{
        use                     generic-service
        host_name               srv_storage-01
        service_description     Disk Space F Drive
        check_command           check_nt!USEDDISKSPACE!-l f -w 80 -c 90
        }

You get a warming alert at 80% disk full and a critical alert 90%

regards
Ananth.



On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Rai Ricafrente <maillist at ricafrente.com> wrote:

I've got a Nagios installation all up and running and working just fine.
>>Now I have to start monitoring some Windows Servers.
>>
>>There are so many different plugins. What are the recommendations for doing this?
>>
>>We have some Win Server 2003, 2008 as well as Exchange and SQL.
>>
>>Thanks
>>
>>
>NSClient++ worked fine for us. 
>
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