Nagios XI Monitoring Hosts Using NRPE

The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Purpose
This document describes how to monitor hosts with Nagios XI by using NRPE.

Target Audience
This document is intended for use by Nagios XI Administrators who want to setup custom monitoring of servers using NRPE or who
have existing hosts with the NRPE agent already installed and configured.

NRPE Overview
NRPE is a monitoring agent and protocol that is often used to
monitor Linux and Unix machines with Nagios.
The NRPE addon consists of two parts:

A client (check_nrpe plugin) that runs on the Nagios

server
A daemon that runs on the remote Linux/Unix
server, processes requests from the client, and
returns status information.

Communication between client and the server can be encrypted to ensure secure data transmission.
Note: The NRPE protocol is supported by various Windows agents as well, so this documentation can be generally applied to
monitoring Windows machines using NRPE. However, the configuration examples provided below are specific to the NRPE server that
runs on Linux/Unix machines.

Simplified Linux Agent

If you want to monitor a CentOS or RHEL machine that does not currently have NRPE
installed on it, you can simplify your workload by following the steps below.
First, install the pre-packaged Nagios XI Linux agent (a combination of NRPE and
various plugins) on each Linux machine you want to monitor by following the
instructions found in the separate document located at the following URL:
http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagiosxi/docs/Installing_The_XI_Linux_Agent.pdf
Next, download and install the Linux monitoring wizard on your Nagios XI server. The
wizard can be downloaded from:
http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagiosxi/wizards/linux-server.zip
Finally, run the Linux monitoring wizard on your Nagios XI server to configure monitoring
of each Linux machine that has the agent installed on it. The Linux monitoring wizard
provides a simple, intuitive method of configuring monitoring when you use the prepackaged agent.

Nagios Enterprises, LLC

P.O. Box 8154
Saint Paul, MN 55108
USA

US: 1-888-NAGIOS-1
Int'l: +1 651-204-9102
Fax: +1 651-204-9103

Web: www.nagios.com
Email: sales@nagios.com

Page 1
Copyright 2011 Nagios Enterprises, LLC
Revision 1.0 September, 2011

Nagios XI Monitoring Hosts Using NRPE

Manually Installing NRPE
If you need to manually install NRPE and monitoring plugins on a remote Linux/Unix server, you can still monitor the machine using
Nagios XI. Instructions and tutorials on installing NRPE and plugins on various operating systems and Linux distributions can be found
on numerous websites on the Internet. Once NRPE is installed on a target machine, you can use the NRPE monitoring wizard
(described below) to configure monitoring.

Existing NRPE Installations

If you were previously using Nagios Core to monitor Linux/Unix machines, you likely have NRPE already installed and configured on
these machines. Nagios XI can monitor these machines using your existing NRPE setup without any further modification to the remote
servers. You can use the NRPE monitoring wizard (described below) to configure monitoring of your Linux/Unix machines.

NRPE Monitoring Wizard

A generic NRPE monitoring wizard is available for Nagios XI that allows you to monitor machines that already have NRPE installed and
configured.
The NRPE monitoring wizard can be downloaded from the following URL:
http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagiosxi/wizards/nrpe.zip
When you run the wizard, it will prompt you for the IP address and
operating system of the remote machine you want to monitor.

The wizard will them allow you to specify NRPE commands that
should be executed to monitor various metrics/services on the remote
machine. When supplying NRPE commands to the wizard, keep the
following in mind:

The Remote NRPE Command should be the short

command name that is defined in the NRPE config file
(nrpe.cfg) on the remote server.
The Command Args are optional and can only be used if
the remote NRPE daemon is configured to accept command
arguments. If it is, you can supply command arguments.
Multiple arguments should be separated by a space.
The Display Name is the name of the service in Nagios that
should be associated with the NRPE command (e.g.
whatever is being monitored)

Finishing Up
That's it! Monitoring remote Linux/Unix servers with Nagios is simple
to accomplish.

Nagios Enterprises, LLC

P.O. Box 8154
Saint Paul, MN 55108
USA

US: 1-888-NAGIOS-1
Int'l: +1 651-204-9102
Fax: +1 651-204-9103

Web: www.nagios.com
Email: sales@nagios.com

Page 2
Copyright 2011 Nagios Enterprises, LLC
Revision 1.0 September, 2011