Alternatives to SSH and NRPE
This chapter focuses mainly on using SSH and NRPE for performing the remote checks. This is because Nagios is widely used to perform checks on the remote machines. There are also various alternate approaches that people take to invoke checks remotely.
One alternative approach is to use an agent that is running on each remote machine and use it to perform tests. A common solution for performing Nagios monitoring remotely this is Nagios Cross-Platform Agent (NCPA), which is available from https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Addons/Monitoring-Agents/NCPA/details. It is an open source agent written in Python that can be installed on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux machines. NCPA also provides a command for performing checks from the Nagios server.
In many cases remote monitoring involves checking the status of web-based applications. In this case it's common to use check_http and send requests for monitoring status to the application. This way, you can invoke a specific...
