Monitoring Baselines with Nagios

System administrators have many tasks, from maintaining uptime to preparing for disaster. They must also ensure systems adhere to security guidelines such as the DoD's Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG). Other than an audit, which most system administrators dread, how can one be sure systems remain in compliance while attentions are focused on day-to-day maintenance tasks? Monitoring - and Nagios provides that with customization options that let a user monitor changes to baselines on remote systems. This paper will focus on monitoring Windows and Linux baselines. It will look at using the Nagios Cross Platform Agent (NCPA) to perform checks between the Nagios server and the monitored hosts as well as looking at some sample, custom scripts to be used for checking configuration settings.