installing ncpa

The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Purpose

This document describes how to install the NCPA monitoring agent for Nagios on Windows and Linux machines.

Target Audience

This document is intended for use by system administrator.

NCPA Installation Overview

NCPA is packaged for all of its target platforms, including Windows, Linux RPM and DEB packaging as well as tarballs for some of the less common operating systems. Packaging is the one portion of NCPA that cannot be truly platform agnostic. However, packaging for NCPA allows for quick and easy installation on all target platforms and this documentation will give examples and on how to install NCPA.

Installing NCPA on Windows

First, download the installer to the machine that you wish to install NCPA onto. The NCPA installer can be found at this link:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/ncpa/ncpa-head.exe

Navigate to the location that the install was downloaded, and double-click theinstaller. After agreeing to the license terms, you will find the configurationscreen. This asks you to fill in some of the pertinent information.

The first thing you will see is the Active Specifications section. NCPA can beused as an active agent by simply entering a token into the text box andclicking Next.

You must remember this token, and enter it when configuring the device withinthe Nagios interface. If you are setting up the agent to send passive resultsback to Nagios, addtional information about its specifications, as well as theToken field are below.

Token:This is the token that the NCPA agent will use as its form of authentication.You will need this token when setting up Nagios to monitor this agent.

The following are absolutely not necessary to fill out to get an active agent up and running on your system. These are for specifying parameters for the passive agent.

NRDP URL:This is the URL that the NCPA passive agent will send its check results back to. This is not necessary if you simply want an active agent.

Hostname:This is the hostname that the agent will report back to Nagios as.

Config Name:This is the NRDS config name that the agent will request when contacting the NRDS server.

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Copyright 2011 Nagios Enterprises, LLCRevision 1.0 September, 2013

NCPA Installation Instructions

Nagios Enterprises, LLC US: 1-888-NAGIOS-1 Web: www.nagios.comP.O. Box 8154Saint Paul, MN 55108USA

Int'l: +1 651-204-9102 Email: [email protected]: +1 651-204-9103

Silent Installations on Windows Machines

The installer also supports a silent install, which would definitely be handy if youre a ninja systems admin! There are four specifications currently supported by the NCPA installer, which are all analogs to the directives in the GUI installer.

All of the following are to be used as such:

/*directive* **value**

while being used on the command line. The following are the names of the directives that are available for a silent install.

NRDP:This specifies the NRDP URL to use.

TOKEN:The token that will be used to access the agents API and web interface.

HOST:The host that the passive agent will report back as.

CONFIG:The name of the NRDS config the agent will be associated with.

Note: For both install methods, none of the values are set in stone and can easily be changed at a later date.

Now the NCPA services are installed and started.

To test your installation see the Testing Your Installation section of this document.

Installing NCPA On Linux Using RPM Packing

First thing that must be done is acquiring the RPM package. The latest RPM package can be downloaded from the following link:

CentOS 5/RHEL 5:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/ncpa/ncpa-head.el5.rpm

CentOS 6/RHEL 6:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/ncpa/ncpa-head.el6.rpm

General RPM:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/ncpa/ncpa-head.rpm

Download this to the machine you would like to monitor, do not download this to your personal workstation or your Nagios server.

Using the command line it would look something like this:

cd /tmpwget http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/ncpa/ncpa-head.rpm

Now that we have our RPM on our system, we simply need to use our package manager to install it. Many commonly used package managers have the ability to install a local package. However, in this example we will the rpm command. If you are using something likeyum or zypper you can use that as well:

rpm -ivh --nomd5 --nodeps ncpa-head.rpm

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Now the NCPA services are installed and started.

You will need to modify /usr/local/ncpa/etc/ncpa.cfg to specify a community string in the [api] section

[api]community_string=XXXXXX

See built-in help for more configuration options at https://:5693/static/help/configuration.html

After making changes, restart the ncpa_listener for the changes to take affect.

/etc/init.d/ncpa_listener restart

To test your installation see the Testing Your Installation section of this document.

Testing Your Installation

To ensure that installation was successful, try accessing the web interface of the agent. In order to this you will need to know

The agents IP The token specified under [api] community_string (This is the token field in the Windows Installer)

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Once you have these pieces of information you can attempt to connect to the web interface using a URL similar to the following:

https://:5693/

This gives the options to view or change configuration settings remotely.

Finishing Up

Now that NCPA is installed on the target, you can monitor the machine using the NCPA monitoring wizard in Nagios XI.

If you have any questions about using NCPA, please contact our technical support team on our support forum at:

http://support.nagios.com/forum

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installing ncpa

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