Elements of a Centreon platform

According to your needs, your platform can consist of several elements: a central server, one or several remote servers, and one or several pollers.

If you are only monitoring a few resources, you will only need a central server.
If you are monitoring a large number of resources, spread the load across a distributed architecture.

Central server

In Centreon, the central server is the main console where you monitor resources. The central server allows you to:

configure the monitoring of your whole infrastructure,
monitor resources
see what all your Centreon servers monitor (central server, remote servers and pollers), using its web interface.

A remote server is attached to a central server. Pollers can be attached to a remote server.

A remote server monitors resources. It has a monitoring engine.
It has a graphical interface, but no configuration menus.
The resources it monitors are displayed in its interface, and in the interface of the central server it is attached to.

A poller can be attached to a remote server, or directly to a central server.

A Centreon poller monitors resources. It has a monitoring engine.
A poller has no graphical interface: the resources it monitors are displayed in the interface of the central server and of the remote server it is attached to.

The Centreon Monitoring Agent (CMA) is an optional piece of software installed on a host to monitor it.

CMA collects metrics and computes statuses, and sends them to Centreon.
It can perform native checks by itself or non-native checks using locally installed plugins.