# About NSClient++

NSClient++ (nscp) aims to be a simple yet powerful and secure monitoring daemon. It was built for Nagios/Icinga, but nothing in the daemon is Nagios/Icinga specific and it can be used in many other scenarios where you want to receive/distribute check metrics.

The deamon has 3 main functions:

1. Allow a remote machine (monitoring server) to request commands to be run on this machine (the monitored machine) which return the status of the machine.
2. Submit the same results to a remote (monitoring server).
3. Take action and perform tasks.

## Extending NSClient++

NSClient++ is designed to be open ended and allow you to customize it in any way you design thus extensibility is a core feature.

- ExternalScripts responds to queries and are executed by the operating system and the results are returned as-is.

    This is generally the simplest way to extend NSClient++ as you can utilize whatever infrastructure or skill set you already have.

- LuaScripts are internal scripts which runs inside NSClient++ and performs various tasks and/or responds to queries.

    This is the best option if you want to allow the script to run on any platform with as little infrastructure as possible.

- PythonScripts are internal scripts which runs inside NSClient++ and performs various tasks and/or responds to queries.

    Python is an easy and powerful language but it requires you to also install python which is often not possible on server hardware.

- .Net modules similar to Native modules below but written on the dot-net platform.

    This allows you to write components on top of the large dot-net ecosystem.

- Modules are native plugins which can extend NSClient++ in pretty much any way possible.

    This is probably the most complicated way but gives you the most power and control.

## Talking to NSClient++

Since NSClient++ is meaningless by itself it also supports a lot of protocols to allow it to be used by a lot of monitoring solutions.

- NRPE (Nagios Remote plugin Executor) is a Nagios centric protocol to collect remote metrics.
- NSCA (Nagios Service Check Acceptor) is a Nagios centric protocol for submitting results.
- NSCP is the native NSClient++ protocol (still under development)
- dNSCP is a high performance distributed version of NSCP for high volume traffic.
- NRDP is a replacement for NSCA.
- check_mk is a protocol utilized by the check_mk monitoring system.
- Syslog is a protocol primarily designed for submitting log records.
- Graphite allows you do real-time graphing.
- SMTP is more of a toy currently.

## Supported OS/Platform

NSClient++ should run on the following operating systems:

- Windows: From NT4 SP5 up to Windows 2008 and Windows 7
- Linux: Debian, Centos and Ubuntu (and possibly others as well)
- Win32, x64 as well as various Linux hardware as well.

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