Source
r/nagios•
techitaway

Which Nagios agent would you use today?

The title pretty much says it. If you were to start a fresh setup, which monitoring agent would you stick with and why? I'm looking to implement Nagios this year and there are so many to choose from. I'd like to standardize on one for simplicity's sake, but maybe that's a bad idea? We're mostly a windows shop but with a few mission critical AIX machines and a few flavors of Linux here and there. Would love to hear your experiences and how you'd do it today!

Posted Jan 25, 2017, 1:53 PM UTC

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yarmethan•

I'm using nrpe and nsclient++ for everything my Nagios Core instance. Pretty happy with them.

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techitawayOP•

Which version of nsclient?

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yarmethan•

Whenever I stand up a new system, I grab the latest one, so I have an assortment. All of them work the same for the disk, CPU, process, and service checks I run on them.

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mikeoquinn•

I'm currently using (and would choose again) NCPA. Single agent for active and passive checks, intuitive API, easily extensible, actively under development by the Nagios team, and overall pretty damned easy to use.

I've used NRPE/NSClient and NRDS before, and NCPA - in my opinion - is far better than they are. Easier to use without sacrificing any functionality that I'm looking for.

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techitawayOP•

I wanted to go with ncpa because it would be uniform across platforms, but I've run into a few issues trying to automate deployment and running custom plugins, I'm just not sure that I'm going to have the time in the future to debug and rework as much as I already have had to. That and the lack of NRDS functionality.

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heden•

There has been a lot of development work on both NCPA and NRDS lately. For exactly this reason. Hopefully soon we'll finish and get them out the door! NCPA will soon be the true One Client to Rule Them All (I Hope).

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techitawayOP•

This will be great to hear! I'm still waiting on management to get me my enterprise license, (it's currently in the works with you guys) before I commit to a client. But if those can get out soon then I can happily start configuring things. It'd be a little daunting with 300+ hosts and no central config management.

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heden•

Excellent! I would play around with all of them and see what works best for you. I've done it a lot of different ways. Fortunately for me, my largest Nagios install (68k checks) was all radio equipment, so SNMP only :)

My favorite (and easiest) method was to put the NRPE config on VM Templates, and have some predefined SSH keys on there so that I could update with ansible.

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mikeoquinn•

I've done automated deployments of NCPA with Ansible, and NRDS functionality is one of the things that's baked in by default. Custom plugins should also be pretty easy to use, just drop the plugin in the plugins path and call via the API.

Not saying you didn't have issues, just that I haven't run into those. They also just released version 2, so things might be fixed that weren't before.

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techitawayOP•

Yeah, I'm retrying a few things using 2.0.2 that just came out.

You mentioned NRDS baked in, but i thought it wasn't because of this https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/ncpa/issues/65 How are you using it?

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mikeoquinn•

Good call - NRDS is essentially two components, the passive check execution/submission, and the central config management. I knew that folks were having problems with config management, but I never really messed around with that side, as around the time we switched to NCPA, we also switched to Ansible for config management, which I found to be easier.

If you configure your passive checks in the [passive checks] section of ncpa.cfg, the check execution and submission to nrdp work fine.

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Cutoffjeanshortz37•

Are you talking about the actual nagios install? Like nagios Core vs XI vs Groundworks? Or alternatives to Nagios? There are many out there now as well.

Or are you talking about the client side, like nsclient++ vs nrpe type?

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techitawayOP•

Clients, nrpe vs ncpa vs nsclient++

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Cutoffjeanshortz37•

Then NRPE for *nix boxes, and nsclient++ for windows boxes which is a mix of multiple things that can monitor whatever you want. I use the check_nt for most basic things, then the nrpe art of nsclient++ for any custom checks i write.

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techitawayOP•

Which version of nsclient do you use, I've seen all sorts of recommendations. And why?

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Cutoffjeanshortz37•

i've stayed on the newest version. It's an MSI so it's easy enough to update via script. Haven't had any hiccups yet. But i know some people don't like being bleeding edge on software.

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Fuzzybunnyofdoom•

I'm using nsclient++ but I havn't really tried any other agents. It works great for my needs. I have no compelling reason to look for a replacement if that helps.

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techitawayOP•

Which version of nsclient do you use?

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Fuzzybunnyofdoom•

The latest or a few versions back.

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