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Is it possible to monitor an ntpd server running on windows using snmp ( or possibly something else ) I couldn't find any documentation on the subject.

I'm interested in any information the server can provide, like current date / time, connection status...

All I know about the ntp server for now is that it comes from here

I would greatly appreciate if any of you have some experience to share on this.

  • Thanks for you answers, but I already have a monitoring software and I have to figure out what are the possibilities to get informations from the ntpd server. SNMP would be the perfect solution since the monitoring software already have this capability but I can, if necessary, make a new module specifically to read information from ntpq for instance. But it's clearly a worse solution in this case. – f4. Apr 02 '10 at 13:19
  • Which monitoring software is it, then? – Michael Hampton Jul 11 '12 at 18:55

5 Answers5

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NTP monitoring plugins exist for Nagios - see http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Network-Protocols/NTP-and-Time. The one I am using does not need SNMP, it just asks NTP server via NTP and compares information.

What should be the output of the monitoring tool? Which OS? Do you need to plug it in some NMS?

L.R.
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  • I suspect most people want to plot the amount of offset and drift over time. Something like this (http://www.satsignal.eu/mrtg/daily_ntp.html) perhaps. – Zoredache Apr 02 '10 at 00:32
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You can use the NTP plugin for Munin if you want to monitor NTP data over time; it will show you delay, offset and jitter. I've attached an example of the output.

Munin NTP output http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/c10ed0a462.png

gareth_bowles
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If you just want to see if your ntpd is running, what its synchronized to, etc, and you're comfortable with command lines, you can use ntpq. I can vouch for this on ntp version 4.2.4, not sure when it became available, but the command is

ntpq -p <hostname-or-ip>

Should show you the list of peers that the ntpd at the specified host is sync'd to, offset and jitter, and what not. The hostname is optional if you want status of ntpd on the current host. If you build ntpd from source, ntpq should be included, along with a bunch of other utilities.

JustJeff
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Meinberg has:

http://www.meinberg.de/english/sw/time-server-monitor.htm#download

David Taylor has more about NTP than I ever wanted to know, including a couple of useful ways of visually monitoring monitor NTP deviation using mrtg. See more at:

http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/index.html

Note the MRTG

He also has a fairly simple monitoring program which allows you to see the quality of your time sources as an overlapping graph:

http://www.satsignal.eu/software/net.htm

Look for NTP Monitor on the page.

Rob

RobW
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Apologies for contributing an answer to an old question but it may help someone searching.

I use ntpstat to check whether a host is synchronizing with an NTP time source. It exits with status 0 if so, and 1 if it is unsynchronized. This makes it very easy to script.

(Some usage examples at nixCraft.)

Aaron Copley
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