README
======

nagios-http is a nagios active check framework that is an alternative 
to the conventional check_by_ssh and NRPE approaches. Like check_by_ssh 
and unlike NRPE, nagios-http check configuration is centralised on your 
nagios server (rather than being distributed), and doesn't require any
special infrastructure on your clients (like an NRPE daemon). Unlike 
check_by_ssh, checks don't require a relatively expensive remote 
connection each time, so they should scale better to large 
installations.

The basic idea behind nagios-http is that checks are done using remote 
cron jobs on the client machines, and results are pushed back to the 
nagios server via HTTP. So checks are active, but asynchronous (or 
semi-synchronous), and local file checks on the nagios server, unless
the check cron job needs to created or updated.