Pros/cons of NRPE and SNMP with Nagios 3?

I have been using Nagios 3 with NRPE on the clients for some time now, and it works great.

Now I heard that if I used SNMP I wouldn't have to install check_ plugins on each client.

So does anyone knows of pros and cons of NRPE vs. SNMP?

My monitor server is a CentOS5 with Nagios 3 and the client are mostly CentOS and Ubuntu.

Solution 1:

SNMP is available for everything, Linux, Unix, Windows, Cisco.. and many more.

Certain information will be available on NRPE that isn't on SNMP. Your setup time with snmpd will be allot quicker, once you get your head around how SNMP works.

You can provide a snmpd.conf config to your clients and they can setup their own snmp daemon quickly and without too much trouble shooting on your behalf. I imagine you requesting access to clients servers to install NRPE. Depending on your install method, your clients systems may not be keeping NRPE up-to-date, unlike snmp which is very mature and guaranteed to be maintained by the distributions package management system!

save yourself some effort and avoid using NRPE unless snmp can not provide Nagios with the correct information.

Solution 2:

There is nothing saying you can't we both!

SNMP is Nice but just like NRPE may not be installed. also SNMP support in windows... Sucks. A big advantage of NRPE is that a lot of the scripts out there are written for NRPE and may Need some hacking to get working with SNMP.