Winrpe: NRPE Monitoring for Windows Systems
Winrpe is an implementation of Nagios NRPE for Windows systems. It bundles the Nagios NRPE addon with xinetd, Cygwin, and a set of Windows-specific NRPE plugins, providing a practical way to monitor Windows hosts using a Nagios-based monitoring setup.
Winrpe includes plugins for monitoring CPU usage, disk space, memory, Windows event logs, services, and performance counters. The plugin-based architecture also allows the installation of additional checks, making the solution easy to extend for custom monitoring requirements.
Nagios NRPE enables the execution of Nagios plugins on remote systems, allowing access to local resources such as CPU load, memory consumption, and disk usageāmetrics that are typically not exposed remotely. To collect this information from Windows machines, an agent such as Winrpe must be installed on each monitored host.
xinetd is used to manage incoming connections and provides access control, connection limits, and detailed logging. Together with Cygwin, which supplies a Linux-like runtime environment on Windows, xinetd enables NRPE to run in a manner consistent with Unix-based Nagios installations.
Overall, Winrpe offers a straightforward way to integrate Windows systems into an existing Nagios monitoring environment using familiar NRPE-based workflows.
Project lifetime: Aug 2008 - Nov 2025