After reviewing the four main tools for graphing performance with Nagios (APAN, Nagiosgraph, Nagiostat, and PerfParse), I decided that Nagiosgraph was the easiest for me to get up and running. Out of the box it worked great for my Linux systems and my network tests, but I needed to add support for monitoring my Windows servers.

I have used APAN in the past, but it was really tough to configure. I also tried PerfParse and liked it. However, it required a lot more resources for the database than I was prepared to handle, and I could probably only keep 30 days of data. But it worked great.

To make things easier I installed the latest CVS nightly of the 1.4.0alpha Nagios Plugins. As of 20040817 these plugins supported performance data output for the check_nt plugin (the one that works with the NSClient service). Once these plugins were complied and installed, I updated the nagiosgraph map file. This file is what is used to parse the output for generating the stats.

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