"J. K. Cliburn" <jcliburn@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > It's my understanding that in order to monitor parameters like, for > example, disk and process status on remote machines, I need to install > nsca or nrpe, which are Nagios add-ons that run on the remote machines. > Can someone on the list tell me which of these two are preferred above > the other, and why? NRPE is used to run monitoring programs (plugins) on remote systems, like a restricted RSH. The NRPE configuration file specifies what plugins are available and the hosts (Nagios servers) that are allowed to request execution of these plugins. NSCA is primarily used to run a distributed monitoring scheme. Let's say that you have a compute cluster and some servers that you want to monitor. To lessen the load on the main Nagios server, you can let some node in the cluster run a local (slave) Nagios server, which then forwards the results from its checks to the main Nagios server. The servers could either have their own slave Nagios server or be checked directly by the master. NSCA is the program that runs on the master server to collect check results from remote slaves. Distributed monitoring might be especially useful when running in an environment with multiple physically separate sites. Regards Ingemar
