Nagios was originally designed to monitor UNIX operating systems. The plugins package developed along with Nagios cannot be used on Microsoft Windows systems. As mentioned in the previous chapter, SNMP can be used to monitor Windows, and this requires the installation of an SNMP agent on the system.

The SNMP agent on a Microsoft Windows system allows you to check for a large number of parameters. There are, however, things that cannot be easily checked using SNMP and cannot be monitored remotely using the standard Nagios plugins. This includes running external processes, gathering information unavailable via SNMP, and checking the status of multiple parameters in a single check.

An alternative to SNMP on Microsoft Windows workstations and servers is to install a dedicated agent that is used to monitor these systems from Nagios. The most commonly used agent is NSClient++ (http://www.nsclient.org/), the first Windows agent to be designed to work strictly with Nagios...