Nagios XI Monitoring Hosts Using NRPE
The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Purpose
This document describes how to monitor hosts with Nagios XI by using NRPE.
Target Audience
This document is intended for use by Nagios XI Administrators who want to setup custom monitoring of servers using NRPE or who have existing hosts with the NRPE agent already installed and configured.
NRPE Overview
NRPE is a monitoring agent and protocol that is often used to monitor Linux and Unix machines with Nagios. The NRPE addon consists of two parts: A client (check_nrpe plugin) that runs on the Nagios server A daemon that runs on the remote Linux/Unix server, processes requests from the client, and returns status information.
Communication between client and the server can be encrypted to ensure secure data transmission. Note: The NRPE protocol is supported by various Windows agents as well, so this documentation can be generally applied to monitoring Windows machines using NRPE. However, the configuration examples provided below are specific to the NRPE server that runs on Linux/Unix machines.
Simplified Linux Agent
If you want to monitor a CentOS or RHEL machine that does not currently have NRPE installed on it, you can simplify your workload by following the steps below. First, install the pre-packaged Nagios XI Linux agent (a combination of NRPE and various plugins) on each Linux machine you want to monitor by following the instructions found in the separate document located at the following URL: http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagiosxi/docs/Installing_The_XI_Linux_Agent.pdf Next, download and install the Linux monitoring wizard on your Nagios XI server. The wizard can be downloaded from: http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagiosxi/wizards/linux-server.zip Finally, run the Linux monitoring wizard on your Nagios XI server to configure monitoring of each Linux machine that has the agent installed on it. The Linux monitoring wizard provides a simple, intuitive method of configuring monitoring when you use the prepackaged agent.
Nagios Enterprises, LLC P.O. Box 8154 Saint Paul, MN 55108 USA
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Copyright 2011 Nagios Enterprises, LLC Revision 1.0 September, 2011
Nagios XI Monitoring Hosts Using NRPE
Manually Installing NRPE
If you need to manually install NRPE and monitoring plugins on a remote Linux/Unix server, you can still monitor the machine using Nagios XI. Instructions and tutorials on installing NRPE and plugins on various operating systems and Linux distributions can be found on numerous websites on the Internet. Once NRPE is installed on a target machine, you can use the NRPE monitoring wizard (described below) to configure monitoring.
Existing NRPE Installations
If you were previously using Nagios Core to monitor Linux/Unix machines, you likely have NRPE already installed and configured on these machines. Nagios XI can monitor these machines using your existing NRPE setup without any further modification to the remote servers. You can use the NRPE monitoring wizard (described below) to configure monitoring of your Linux/Unix machines.
NRPE Monitoring Wizard
A generic NRPE monitoring wizard is available for Nagios XI that allows you to monitor machines that already have NRPE installed and configured. The NRPE monitoring wizard can be downloaded from the following URL: http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagiosxi/wizards/nrpe.zip When you run the wizard, it will prompt you for the IP address and operating system of the remote machine you want to monitor.
The wizard will them allow you to specify NRPE commands that should be executed to monitor various metrics/services on the remote machine. When supplying NRPE commands to the wizard, keep the following in mind:
The Remote NRPE Command should be the short command name that is defined in the NRPE config file (nrpe.cfg) on the remote server. The Command Args are optional and can only be used if the remote NRPE daemon is configured to accept command arguments. If it is, you can supply command arguments. Multiple arguments should be separated by a space. The Display Name is the name of the service in Nagios that should be associated with the NRPE command (e.g. whatever is being monitored)
Finishing Up
That's it! Monitoring remote Linux/Unix servers with Nagios is simple to accomplish.
Nagios Enterprises, LLC P.O. Box 8154 Saint Paul, MN 55108 USA
US: 1-888-NAGIOS-1 Int'l: +1 651-204-9102 Fax: +1 651-204-9103
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Copyright 2011 Nagios Enterprises, LLC Revision 1.0 September, 2011
