Monitoring Apple Macs

I am relatively new to this nagios monitoring and have managed to monitor the usual CPU, Memory, disk space etc on 40 Windows servers from my nagios server (nagios v2.0 running on a Red Hat Fedora Core 5)

I am looking to progress now to monitoring a few Apple Mac OS X machines that we use in different departments. I have seen a collection of plugins that are available to monitor the Xserve RAIDs (of which we only have the one !) but was just wondering if anyone has had any success with monitoring Apple Mac workstations (of which we have about 20 or so important ones). If so could you please point me to some URL’s for further reading as I cannot seem to find much out on the internet concerning monitoring Apple Macs. These mac workstations are OSX and I am looking to monitor things such as memory usage, folder contents for number of files, free disk space etc.

I understand that macs have a unix core (Darwin?) and you can see from a terminal sessions but other that that I am relatively new to apple macs. So what kind of plugins do I use? NRPE,SNMP, or are there other specific ones available.

Any advice given will be greatfully received and much appreciated…

Joe

I suppose, since it’s a 'nix type of system, you can do the same that you would do for any 'nix box. Setup nagios on that macosx and use nsca to send data back to central server. Or take the nrpe route and make active checks.