NSCA-ng

The NSCA-ng package provides a client-server pair that makes the Nagios command file accessible to remote systems. This allows for submitting passive check results, downtimes, and many other commands to Nagios or compatible monitoring solutions. It can also be used for implementing distributed setups. The submitted data is queued by the NSCA-ng server if Nagios goes down. Multiple check results or commands can be submitted in one go, and multiline plugin output is fully supported. Client modules are available for Perl and Python.

NSCA-ng also offers the following features:

• Security
  NSCA-ng uses TLS encryption and shared-secret authentication with per-client passwords, as well as fine-grained authorization control.
• Performance
  The NSCA-ng server is written in C and uses an event-driven architecture. Disk I/O is avoided unless the data cannot be submitted in one go due to its size (on Linux, the threshold is 64 kB). In this case, the data is handed over to Nagios via asynchronously written files.
• Compatibility
  The NSCA-ng client (send_nsca) accepts all input, command line arguments, and configuration files accepted by the send_nsca binary provided with the original NSCA package. NSCA clients cannot talk to NSCA-ng servers (nor vice versa), but NSCA and NSCA-ng servers can happily run side by side.
• Extensibility
  NSCA-ng uses a simple and documented text-based protocol that doesn’t impose arbitrary packet size limits. It is easily extensible in a backward-compatible manner.
• Portability
  The NSCA-ng code has been built with many different compilers on various platforms. It should run on any non-ancient Unix-like system.

Download

Binary Packages

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• RedHat
• SUSE
• Slackware
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD

Source Code

• nsca-ng-1.7.tar.gz (sig|sha1)
• Old releases can be found in the download area.

The files are signed using the NSCA-ng developers key.

Development

The NSCA-ng source code is maintained in a public Git repository . The development workflow includes continuous integration tests and static code analysis.

Documentation

The README file gives an overview and provides instructions for building NSCA-ng from source. See the release history for a summary of changes between versions. A detailed change log is also available.

Manual Pages

• nsca-ng(8)
  HTML | PDF
• nsca-ng.cfg(5)
  HTML | PDF
• send_nsca(8)
  HTML | PDF
• send_nsca.cfg(5)
  HTML | PDF

Further Documentation

• Sample server configuration
• Protocol
• Wish list
• License

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Heiko Schlichting, who contributed most of the good ideas behind NSCA-ng. Thanks also go to Alexander Golovko for contributing the Python module and to Matthias Bethke for contributing the Perl module.