The acronym stands for Nagios SNMP Switch Check Tool. The idea is that all you need to pass to the tool is an IP address and a community string and it should figure out what kind of device it is talking to and determine the health (temperature, fan, CPU usage, memory usage, etc.) of the device. It generates performance data when available, so it can also be used for graphing resources.

The package will ship a nssct script. It can be used as a nagios plugin. Refer to nssct --help for information on how to invoke it.

When using it in conjunction with Nagios a service configuration will likely look like following.

define service{
    use                 generic-service
    host_name           MONITORED_DEVICE
    check_command       check_nssct!PUBLIC_COMMUNITY
    service_description nssct
    }

If you are using pnp4nagios, use generic-service-perfdata instead of generic-service.

If your device does not work with nssct, please create a machine readable dump. Use the following parameters to do that:

snmpwalk -Onx -Ih --hexOutputLength=1024 ...