Nagios can be pushed very far in terms of what can be monitored and how this can be done. It also offers a way to balance the load of monitoring activities as well as providing a fail-safe solution by using several Nagios servers.

This chapter describes additional techniques that can be used to monitor Windows by installing and configuring a dedicated agent. It shows how to communicate both from the Nagios server to the Windows machines as well as the other way around. It describes how to communicate with such agents, in addition to describing other features.

This chapter covers a very popular agent available for Microsoft Windows — NSClient++. This allows the querying of various system parameters over the network, and offers multiple ways in which this information can then be received by the Nagios server. Their functionality offers much more than what can be done by querying only the SNMP.

This chapter also covers how Nagios can be configured so that it notifies...