I use NRPE at this time because I feel that it uses minimizes the number of services entries in the config. I may be wrong but let me explain what I mean. If you have a service on several systems but have unique thresholds, a service would have to be defined for each host to account for the different warning/critical levels. Any change would mean stop/starting Nagios. With using NRPE, I have the one service definition for several hosts. The actual configuration for the thresholds is on the host in the nrpe.cfg. I use another file and include it in the nrpe.cfg. If a change is needed, I change the value on the host. I don't need to stop/start Nagios. The other reason I like this method is that I don't want several people mucking with the config files. There are three people in my group and its easier to explain where to change the levels on the local host then to have them in the config files. I appreciate the feedback as to other ways to accomplish this. Steve