I’ve recently set up Nagios on one of our test servers, and the Windows client for Nagios allows you to monitor services (whether they started, stopped, etc.). However, the name of the service to monitor isn’t always the same as the name in the Services application in Administrative Tools.

To find out the name of the service, you’ll have to look at the registry:

  1. Open up regedit (Run, regedit)
  2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  3. Navigate to SYSTEM
  4. Navigate to CurrentControlSet
  5. Navigate to Services
  6. Find the service you plan on monitoring. The name of the node is the name you need to enter on the Nagios server as the name of the service.