This chapter focuses mainly on using SSH and NRPE for performing the remote checks. This is because Nagios is widely used to perform checks on the remote machines. There are also various alternate approaches that people take to invoke checks remotely. A very popular approach is to use frameworks for working remotely. In such cases, you might need to create some scripts or jobs that perform the checks, but the entire network communication along with authentication and authorization are already implemented in them.

One such framework is the Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) available at http://staf.sourceforge.net/. This is a peer-to-peer-based framework that allows you to write code that performs specific jobs on remote machines. As the system is not centralized, there is no critical resource that can make your entire system malfunction if it is down.

STAF can be used from various languages such as Java, Perl, Python, Tcl, and Ant. This means that pieces...