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?

Thanks.

www.dracoware.com might help, might not be opensource, but it's the most i know

NAGIOS has a Windows client you can install and report on standard services such as Event Logs alerts, CPU/Mem/Disk Usage etc. And monitor standard TCP services. You can also run syslog-ng on Windows and send all event log info to your Linux syslog.

Its easy from there to pipe into a MySQL or PostgreSQL database.

I can't install anything on the servers that isn't already installed. This would include Nagios agents or other agents. Perfmon is already on the machine so I can use it if I can figure out a way to use it using Linux.

A windows machine can pull up the event viewer logs and perfmon settings from another machine if you have the user/password. I'm surprised that no one has been able to do this with Linux as far I have been able to discover.

We run nagios where I work, but we have the client installed on all servers that are being monitored, we get monitoring of things like CPU utilization, disk usage, mem usage and selected services (iis, sql, etc.) It seems pretty powerful, which may be the reason why it's hard to find a less invasive way to set up remote monitoring. For us it's pretty much if you want your server monitored, install this (nagios agent) and we have some pretty security conscious customers.

If you are looking at developing a solution you would probably have to crudge something together by checking the source code on tools like the nagios agent and maybe some samba stuff to figure out more about Windows' network authentication?

If you have an available Windows server running IIS and .NET that you can install software on, the Nagios Web Service Checker works beautifully.
http://nagios-wsc.sourceforge.net/

I didn't want to go through the hassle of installing NSclient on all our Windows server, and I stumbled across this gem of a plugin. It uses Windows Management Instrumentation API to poll just about anything from one Windows machine. There is a script included that runs on your Nagios machine that in turn polls that, and reports the results to Nagios.
Sorry for the late reply, but it happened to coincide with my search...