Installing The Nagios Ubuntu and Debian Linux Agent
In order to monitor a Linux/Unix desktop or server with Nagios XI, you must first install an agent on the target machine. This guide takes you through the steps of installing and configuring the Linux agent in preparation for monitoring the machine with Nagios XI.
NCPA (Nagios Cross Platform Agent)
We highly recommend using NCPA (the Nagios Cross Platform Agent) rather than NRPE. Although NRPE can be useful for legacy operating systems, or in cases where you already have NRPE installed on many machines, NCPA is the best modern option. It provides enhanced capabilities such as a check API, a web GUI, cross-platform support, active and passive capabilities, and smart wizards which scan target hosts for drives, services, and processes during configuration. NCPA is regularly updated and improved by the Nagios development team. You can find the NCPA installation instructions here:
NCPA v3 Agent Installation Instructions
NRPE (Legacy)
The XI Linux agent is simply a combination of NRPE, the official Nagios Plugins, and a few additional plugins, along with some specific NRPE configuration file options.
The Linux agent installation is currently supported on RHEL/CentOS 5+, Fedora 14+, SLES 11+, OpenSUSE 11+, Ubuntu 12+, and Debian 6+. These steps will likely also work with little to no modification on other distributions, such as CrunchBang, easypeasy, gNewSense, Xandros, MEPIS, Mint, Knoppix, Baltix, Guadalinux, eBox, Untangle, and Vyatta.
Nagios XI 2024 & 2026
Installing the Linux Agent (NRPE) in Nagios XI 2024 & 2026
Nagios XI v5 (Legacy)
Installing The Linux Agent (NRPE) in Nagios XI v5 (Legacy)
If you’ve already read the documentation and are just looking for the download URL again, it’s https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagiosxi/agents/linux-nrpe-agent.tar.gz.
