NSClient++ (nscp) aims to be a simple yet powerful and secure monitoring daemon. It was built for Nagios/Icinga, but nothing in the daemon is Nagios/Icinga specific and it can be used in many other scenarios where you want to receive/distribute check metrics.
The deamon has 3 main functions:
- Allow a remote machine (monitoring server) to request commands to be run on this machine (the monitored machine) which return the status of the machine.
- Submit the same results to a remote (monitoring server).
- Take action and perform tasks.
NSClient++ can be found at: http://nsclient.org
Documentation can be found at: http://docs.nsclient.org
NSClient++ is designed to be open ended and allow you to customize it in any way you design thus extensibility is a core feature.
- ExternalScripts responds to queries and are executed by the operating system and the results are returned as-is. This is generally the simplest way to extend NSClient++ as you can utilize whatever infrastructure or skill set you already have.
- LuaScripts are internal scripts which runs inside NSClient++ and performs various tasks and/or responds to queries. This is the best option if you want to allow the script to run on any platform with as little infrastructure as possible.
- PythonScripts are internal scripts which runs inside NSClient++ and performs various tasks and/or responds to queries. Python is an easy and powerful language but it requires you to also install python which is often not possible on server hardware.
- .Net modules similar to Native modules below but written on the dot-net platform. This allows you to write components on top of the large dot-net ecosystem.
- Modules are native plugins which can extend NSClient++ in pretty much any way possible. This is probably the most complicated way but gives you the most power and control.
Since NSClient++ is meaningless by itself it also supports a lot of protocols to allow it to be used by a lot of monitoring solutions.
- NRPE (Nagios Remote plugin Executor) is a Nagios centric protocol to collect remote metrics.
- NSCA (Nagios Service Check Acceptor) is a Nagios centric protocol for submitting results.
- NSCP is the native NSClient++ protocol (still under development)
- dNSCP is a high performance distributed version of NSCP for high volume traffic.
- NRDP is a replacement for NSCA.
- check_mk is a protocol utilized by the check_mk monitoring system.
- Syslog is a protocol primarily designed for submitting log records.
- Graphite allows you do real-time graphing.
- SMTP is more of a toy currently.
NSClient++ should run on the following operating systems:
- Windows: From NT4 SP5 up to Windows 2008 and Windows 7
- Linux: Debian, Centos and Ubuntu (and possibly others as well)
- Win32, x64 as well as various Linux hardware as well.