Notification escalate too fast if no one notified

Andreas Ericsson ae at op5.se
Wed Aug 11 09:40:06 CEST 2004


Shad L. Lords wrote:
>> The submitted patch had some negative side effects, but it did point
>> out a closely related bug: the current notification number should not
>> be incremented if no contacts were notified.  I'll get that patched
>> tonight.  The original thought regarding the code you patched was
>> that notification variables (current notification #, next
>> notification time, etc.) should not get updated if no one actually
>> gets notified.  This includes contacts that have no valid
>> timeperiods.
> 
> 
> What negative side effects did you observe.  I've had no problems on 
> this side and notifications are going out as expected.  The way I see it 
> if there isn't a person defined for a given escalation then it would 
> fail back to the default contact.  So there will always be someone 
> defined for a given notification number but they might not be notified 
> because of out of hours. I still can't understand why you wouldn't want 
> to increment notification numbers even if you don't notify someone.
> 

The notification number is very useful in telling the boss (who only 
gets notification number 5 or something) that his staff hasn't been 
doing a very good job at fixing an issue they knew existed. If the 
notification number is incremented without sending notifications, the 
boss might get mad for no good reason. Besides, the natural value for 
notification_number is number of notifications actually sent. Maybe 
adding a suppressed_notifications variable and macro would help?

>> Unfortunately, this doesn't solve your problem. What I would suggest
>> is that you set yourself to be the default contact for the host (with
>> a default notification interval of 120 minutes) and keep the
>> escalation you've already created.  This will have the effect you're
>> looking for.  You will be notified first at 120 minutes.  After that,
>> the escalation will kick in and you will be notified every 30 minutes
>> until the problem is resolved.
> 
> 
> We have our notification set at 30 minutes.  We have the pager get 
> notified at 1-3 tier 2 kicks in at 3-0 and managers get 5-5.  There are 
> situations where tier 2 is set to work hours only.  However management 
> wants to always be notified 24x7 at number 5.  With the patch I 
> submitted things are working exactly as we want.

But it would most likely break things elsewhere, so someone else will 
most likely patch it back to work the way it did before.

> If notification 
> numbers aren't incremented unless someone gets notified then unless 4 
> went out managers would never get notified.
> 

This is a configuration issue that can be worked around by using retry 
intervals and max check attempts. If first notification goes nowhere, 
you most likely have a very non-standard configuration, so any patches 
that will make it easier for you to keep it that way is likely to break 
things for hordes of other Nagios users.

> -Shad
> 

-- 
Sourcerer / Andreas Ericsson
OP5 AB


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