Nagios offers multiple ways of monitoring the Microsoft Windows workstations and servers. These vary from monitoring computers remotely and querying SNMP, to installing dedicated agents. Another very interesting feature of Nagios is its ability to effortlessly configure multiple machines in order to perform monitoring and to have a single place where the results are easily available.

In this chapter, we have learned how to install the NSClient++ agent that can be used to monitor Microsoft Windows based machines and using Nagios.

We have also learned different ways in which checks can be performed— for example, using the check_nt plugin, using the NRPE protocol, or scheduling the checks on the agent and sending the results using the NSCA protocol.

This chapter also covered how to set up multiple Nagios instances and a Nagios instance so that it reports all host and services status updates to another Nagios instance. This can be used to split the load related to actually performing the...