Wish: Multiple instances of alerts on the same service/host

Ståle Askerød Johansen s.a.johansen at usit.uio.no
Mon Mar 19 12:51:28 CET 2007


(This may appear twice. I fumbled with my subscription confirmation)


Here at the University of Oslo we are currently running Nagios
alongside our current monitoring system in order to check if
Nagios suits our needs.

So far, we are very happy with most of what we see. However, we
also consider using Nagios (with some suitable www-interface) as
our primary alarm console. This means that we will want to feed lots
of passive checks into Nagios from several other systems.

Let me give you an example:

- we want to forward SNMP-traps to Nagios from the management cards of 
our Dell and HP servers.
- we setup our trap-receivers to submit this through NSCA.
- on the nagios server, we define the service "snmp trap" on all the 
relevant hosts. the service is volatile and not active.
- we test.
- the hardware sends for instance "Fan 2 not OK". Nagios receives this 
as a critical event. let's pretend the operator uses some time to fix this.
- in the mean time, the hardware on the same host sends for instance 
"battery needs replacement". Nagios receives this as a critical event, 
but the previous event if NO LONGER visible in the interface.

Some may argue that we need to make separate services for each type of 
trap we want to receive, but sheer numbers make this not very elegant.


We need a way to tell Nagios that "this service is of a special kind 
whose events should not replace each other as they are received". This 
will make it easier to use Nagios and a suitable web-gui as a central 
alarm receiver without adding thousands of new services.

The same problem also makes it difficult to make, for instance, a plugin 
that monitors all userdisks on a host and reports to a service 
"userdisks", since the events will overwrite each other.

Has anyone else thought of this? Is it difficult to implement? Are we 
wrong in assuming that this is impossible with the present Nagios? Have 
we misunderstood completely? Is it a stupid and childish idea? :-)

-- 
Ståle Johansen, sysadmin, University of Oslo, Norway.

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