The NCPA Web GUI: A Key Agent Advantage
NCPA (the Nagios Cross Platform Agent) is an awesome option for monitoring Windows, Linux, and OSX systems. Not only can it run on multiple OSs and architectures and be used for both active and passive checks, but it also includes the NCPA web GUI, a user interface packed with useful capabilities to help you keep your monitored hosts up and running. In this article, we’ll take a quick tour of the sections and features of the GUI.
Getting to the NCPA Web GUI
To access the GUI, simply install NCPA on a system, then navigate to the following in your browser, replacing <NCPA.Host.IP.Address> with the IP address of the host:
https://<NCPA.Host.IP.Address>:5693
You may need to add a security exception in your browser since NCPA is using a self-signed certificate to provide encrypted HTTPS access to the GUI.
Exploring the GUI
Home
The GUI starts out simple enough with the main Dashboard. This page shows NCPA agent information, monitored system information, and an overview of the total checks run by NCPA over the previous 30 days.
Checks
In this menu, you can review and check results for the last 30 days. This data is stored automatically by NCPA on the host and can be filtered by Status and Type.
Live Data
The Live Data section provides a real-time look a CPU, Memory, Disk, and Interface Graphs on the Stats Graphs page, as well as a Top Processes section.
Stats Graphs
Top Processes
This section of Live Data provides a way to see process CPU and memory usage in real time. You can choose to highlight the name of a specific process in the results and define Warning and Critical thresholds to color-code those processes that exceed your defined limits.
Check API
One of the most powerful features of NCPA is the check API, which can be explored and tested in the web GUI.
A great aspect of the NCPA API is that it works the same way across platforms, so the way you’ll write check commands to poll API endpoints is uniform whether the host you’re checking is Windows, Linux, or OSX.
In the API section of the NCPA web GUI, you can dig into all of the endpoints and run checks using them to not only review the JSON output but also to run them as Nagios checks. It’s even possible to generate a full check command for the endpoint to use in Nagios XI or Nagios Core by selecting the options highlighted in green here:
You can learn more about the NCPA API in this section of the NCPA v3 documentation:
Nagios Log Server Integration
Log Server comes pre-loaded with NCPA, bundled with a couple of great plugins to help you monitor JVM heap and cluster status (you’ll see these in the Plugins section at the bottom of Step 2 of the NCPA Wizard in Nagios XI).
You can access the NCPA web GUI, view and update your NCPA token, and start/stop/restart the service in the Admin > Monitor Backend menu.
If you’d like to learn more about monitoring your Log Server cluster with NCPA, take a look at this article:
Nagios Network Analyzer Integration
Although not specifically an NCPA Web GUI feature, it’s worth noting that Network Analyzer uses NCPA for its Route function, using data collected by NCPA with the check_traceroute.py plugin:
You can learn more about setting up route monitoring here:
How to Set Up Route Monitoring in Nagios Network Analyzer
Getting Started with NCPA
If you’re not already using NCPA, you can find details on installation, NCPA wizard usage, and passive check configuration here:
