About NSClient++

NSClient++ (or nscp as I tend to call it nowadays) aims to be a simple yet powerful and secure monitoring daemon for windows operating systems. It is built for Nagios but nothing in the daemon is actually Nagios specific and could probably with little or no change be integrated in any monitoring software that supports running user tools for polling.

The structure of the daemon is a simple NT service that loads a plug-ins to an internal stack. The plug-ins can then request data (poll performance data) from the other plug-ins through the internal stack. As of now there are a few plug-ins for basic performance data collection. For details of supplied modules see wiki:CheckCommands.

NSClient++ can be extended in two ways you can either write your own plug-in to or you can execute an external script (as of now batch/exe/*). Writing your own plug-in is of course the most powerful way but requires knowledge of C++ or other language which can produce DLLs and interface with regular C programs (generally every other language available, but there is some simple API helpers for C/C++ as well as descriptions).

As for checking with NSClient++ I would recommend NRPE as it is a lot more flexible than check_nt. But NSClient has full support for check_nt and if there is an interest I could probably add support for check_nt from nc_net.

Status

As people have noticed I haven't update this in a few months, not uncommon for me as I often have lot of things going on.

I will try to sort through the mails and issues I have received during the past months and in an orderly fashion try to fix them and hopefully have a new version out in not so long away fixing major issues, and a bit longer off fixing minor issues. The main problem right now I that I'm working on my ​gallery software that will become my master thesis as well as trying to study for my final exams so time is not something I have a lot of. I have also switched jobs and no longer use NSCPlus myself so it will be "hard" for me to do "quality" beta testing...

Anyways, the gist of it: Hopefully new version in a week or so fixing major issues, and slightly more activity during fall... (After the 23:d of October when I write my exam I will have a bit more time...

Help wanted

Bug reports!!''' If you have outstanding issues feel free to report again, I'm going to go through the backlog but a reminder is always nice...

Support this project

If you like and use this program feel free to help out in any way either by updating the documentation (this WIKI) add examples ideas and such. Or help out with writing code and/or patches and such or even if you are so inclined send a few ​$$ :)

Latest News

For older news see the wiki:News page.

2006-11-09 Server problems Cooling failed in the server room where I host my servers so everything was down for a week, now it is backup again :)

2006-10-09 New version Minor updates mainly w2k3 fix...

2006-04-04 New version I really don't want to release this as I haven't had time to test it properly (and see what happend last time I didn't test properly). But hopefully it will at least work better then the previous build.

NOTICE A major change is that the NSC.ini file now needs an option to allow NSClient++ to read it (so if that is missing (and it most likely is as it is a new option) NSClient++ wont even start!

[Settings] ; ;# USE THIS FILE ; Use the INI file as opposed to the registry if this is 0 and the use_reg in the registry is set to 1 ; the registry will be used instead. use_file=1

If you dont add the above to your setting file you will end up with the following:

e .\NSClient++.cpp(162) Could not find settings: No settings method specified, cannot start e .\NSClient++.cpp(106) Service *NOT* started!

The reason for this is that you can now have the settings in the registry if you so wish. (to test this enable the RemoteConfiguration module and try the following:

NSClient++.exe RemoteConfiguration ini2reg NSClient++.exe RemoteConfiguration reg2ini This is not perfect (actually it is sort of buggy so round tripping is not a good idea, but you can move from INI -> reg without problems)

The RemoteConfiguration has *major* security implications so I wouldn't use it unless you really want to (you can use it for moving the registry but safely enough though) but leaving it there means anyone with NRPE access can reconfigure you client (not a very secure thing). A few interesting trick you can do with the RemoteConfiguration is:

NRPE ... -c readConf -a ini NRPE ... -c setVariable -a int NRPE port 12345 NRPE ... -c getVariable -a NRPE port NRPE ... -c writeConf -a reg (Soon you will also be able to do the following: NRPE ... -c rehash)

Download

NSClient++ can be downloaded from the source forge page ​http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=131326

versions 0.2.5i and 0.2.5i2 of client are not working, try 0.2.5h ​http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/nscplus/NSClient++-0.2.5j.zip Hopefully (?) the "j" build should work, if not let me know ASAP!

Thanks

• Johnny Wetlaufer for the nice logo
• Everyone who reports bugs!

About this page

Note: this is not a web site it is a WIKI that means *anyone* can edit it so if you click edit you have not "so h4x0r3ed this b0x3n" you have simply made a fool out of yourself (unless of course you have contributed to the page in which case I'm just thankful :)....

Feel free to edit/make corrections and add content to this page. I hope that the documentation can improve as a community effort. It would especially be nice to have some real-world check command setup from Nagios.

The site is using ​trac:Trac