Wondering how to resolve ‘Permission denied’ WMI error in Nagios? We will help you.

As a part of our Server Management Services, we help our customers with requests related to Windows.

Today, let us see how our Support Techs fix error.

Cause for ‘Permission denied’ WMI error in Nagios

First and foremost, we might experience this error message even though the plugin tests are successful in a terminal session:

This text indicates an error message:

UNKNOWN – Permission denied when trying to store the state data. Sometimes this happens if you have been testing the plugin from the command line
as a different user to the Nagios process user. You will need to change the permissions on the file or remove it. The actual error text is:
can’t create /tmp/cwpss_checkcpu__1025143___.state: Permission denied at /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_wmi_plus.pl line 2460

A very common problem that occurs is when we have been experimenting with a new command at the command line as the root user and it works fine.

However, when we create the service in Nagios, it shows the error message.

Basically, the reason why is that the plugin stores temporary files in the /tmp/ directory and updates them each time it is run.

If the first time we executed that check as the root user, then later on the nagios user will not have permission to update the file.

Solution for Permission denied WMI error in Nagios

Today, let us see how to resolve “permission denied” WMI error.

Check the permissions of the files with this command:

ls -ls /tmp/*.state

Here we can see that the root user/group is the owner of the file:

-rw-r–r– 1 root root 91 Apr 24 16:10 /tmp/cwpss_checkcpu__1025143___.state

The simplest option is to delete the files with this command:

rm -rf /tmp/*.state

After Nagios executes the WMI service command, we can see that the nagios user/group is the owner of the file:

-rw-rw-r– 1 nagios nagios 105 Apr 24 16:24 /tmp/cwpss_checkcpu__1025143___.state

[Need help with the procedures? We are here for you]

Conclusion

In short, Nagios supports WMI monitoring, which provides admins with a simple method of monitoring their Windows servers and workstations without having to install or configure agents. Today, we saw how our Support Techs resolve error.