Campus Monitoring, Nagios Cross-Platform Agent (NCPA)

Actively monitoring services on a host with Nagios typically requires an agent to be installed on the host to be monitored; NCPA is one such agent and is typically the recommended solution.

One approach to monitoring services on a host involves installing an agent on the host to be monitored.  Other approaches including passive monitoring, SNMP, etc. are beyond the scope of this article.

NCPA (Nagios Cross-Platform Agent) is the recommended agent for active monitoring; it can be downloaded here:

Nagios Cross-Platform Agent:
Monitoring agent for Windows, Linux, and Mac

NCPA for Mac has not worked for quite some time due to issues with Apple's Developer Program licensing

In order for NCPA listener service to be queried a port (default: 5693/TCP) needs to be allowed; please make appropriate firewall; and no change in this situation is expected. If you're interested in more information including possible work-arounds, please create a support request (details below).

An Admin for the host to be monitored is asked to download, install, and configure NCPA. Once completed, NCPA can be verified by checking the following address using a web browser:

https://{FQDN or IPV4 address of host to be monitored}:5693/gui/

Note: in all likelihood, one will need to click through a self-signed certificate; this won't be an issue later when Nagios XI queries the agent.

Note: the password you are prompted for corresponds to the community_string variable set in the ncpa.cfg configuration file, typically found in /usr/local/ncpa/etc (Linux) or C:\Program Files (x86)\Nagios\NCPA\etc (Windows).

Once proper operation of NCPA on the host to be monitored has been verified, monitoring for the host and its services can be configured in Nagios XI. One way to do this, for example, would be to run the "Linux Server: Monitor a remote Linux server, with NCPA" wizard found in Configure > Configuration Wizards > .

Questions? Please create a support request ticket by sending an email to Campus-Monitoring@mx.uillinois.edu.



Keywordscampus monitoring, nagios, ncpa   Doc ID116428
OwnerRobert M.GroupUniversity of Illinois Technology Services
Created2022-02-01 16:15:59Updated2023-02-03 18:30:51
SitesUniversity of Illinois Technology Services
Feedback  0   0