Nagios offers multiple ways to monitor Microsoft Windows workstations and servers. These vary from monitoring computers remotely, to querying SNMP and installing dedicated agents.

Installing agents to monitor Microsoft Windows systems may be a time-consuming task. However, the advantage is that dedicated agents such as NSClient++ can be configured to perform checks that cannot be performed otherwise. It can read WMI, and monitor system processes and services. In addition, such agents can run external binaries and scripts so that any language you are familiar with can be used to perform additional checks.

NSClient++ can also send results directly to Nagios using the NSCA protocol. This can be used to avoid problems with firewalls and security policies which may disallow connections to Windows machines.

Another very interesting feature of Nagios is its ability to configure multiple machines easily in order to perform monitoring, and also to have a single place where the results are easily...