Book Image

Learning Nagios 3.0

Book Image

Learning Nagios 3.0

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Nagios 3.0
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Introduction to NRPE


Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) is a daemon for running check commands on remote computers. It is designed explicitly to allow the central Nagios server to trigger checks on other machines in a secure manner.

NRPE offers a very good security mechanism along with encryption mechanisms. It is possible to specify a list of machines that can run checks via NRPE, and which plugins can be run along with aliases that should be used by the central Nagios server.

The main difference is that the communication overhead is much smaller than for the SSH checks. This means that both central Nagios server and the remote machine need less CPU time to perform a check. This is mainly important for Nagios servers that deal with a lot of checks performed remotely on machines. If the SSH overhead compared to NRPE is only one second, then for performing 20,000 checks, it is 5.5 hours spent on negotiations that can be saved.

It also offers a better level of security than using SSH mechanisms...