Npstats' main purpose is to monitor the noaaport receivers and servers. Npstats can monitor devices that are local to a site as well as devices in remote sites. In the latter role, Npstats acts as a central monitoring server to which clients can connect to compare the status of the noaaport signal in widely separated geographical areas.

Npstats consists of a daemon npstatsd, which is responsible for running a data collector manager and a qrunner. The manager, at certain periods, execute a set of device pollers that retrieve the status data from the local devices that are being monitored. In addition, data from remote devices can be received by ftp, http or sftp. The data is accumulated in a spool directory until the npstatsd daemon executes the qrunner, and then the data is archived locally or remotely, or both, depending on the configuration. The data can be archived in plain text files and/or in a database such as Postgres or Mysql.

In short, Npstats can be configured to be used only as a local device monitor, as a centralized server, or both. Npstats comes with its own (tclhttpd-based) web server for monitoring Npstats itself.