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Here is how our own internal monitoring is set up to check our own domain, which involves servers outside of our control: We've defined PingOnly-entries nodes with the model set statically to "PingOnly" for the external DNS servers in question, and activated service "opmantek-dns" for them, which looks like this:
Please note that model "PingOnly" by itself is not sufficient to disable SNMP (or WMI) accesses; you also have to change the node configuration option collect to false.
local, custom script
On a system that is under your control, and which runs NMIS you can execute arbitrary scripts to collect service statuses. The example script below checks that the local NMIS server itself has a running BIND DNS server process:
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