Cheshire Cat Computing

I'm trying to monitor a series of Windows servers from Linux using Nagios. Using Windows, it's no problem to pull up perfmon stats (CPU, memory, services) or event log entries to look for problems. I don't want to switch to Windows at this point in the game and I'm looking for something that will run on Linux - and this is the catch - without installing anything on the server. I'd like to provide the same user/password the Windows monitor is using and get access to the same information.

I'm not familiar with the authentication mechanism Windows uses to allow other Windows machines to have access to the information. At a minimum, does anyone know any pieces that could be cobbled together to do this?

Monitoring perfmon counters under windows is very hard without an agent. Microsoft dont make it easy for you.

You could install ns_client, nc_net, nsclient++ etc and access them that way - but you dont want to install 3rd party stuff.

You could install SNMP, but you need to add extension config to it to allow perfmon counters to be accessed

There is a WMI interface apparently to Windows to get the data, but you need to log in to the domain. Possibly someone has written a Nagios plugin to work around this... but I think most people go the easy route and use an agent. Even the commercial apps like HP-NNM use an agent or SNMP.

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Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11