Nagios acknowledgement enhancement request

[Jim Winkle]

Hi,

I have a suggestion for a future enhancement of Nagios.

In short, I'd like there to be a way to have Nagios send notifications 
until we acknowledge a problem -- for certain unique plugins -- without 
ignoring future problems. Background and more details follow.

We're using the check_logfiles plugin to monitor syslogs (e.g.
/var/adm/messages on Solaris). check_logfiles returns CRITICAL when it 
detects a problem, but then normally clears itself (returns OK) the next 
time it runs.  Nagios notifies us only once under this scenerio, and since 
it's possible that pagers might miss just one page (paging services aren't 
100% reliable), we'd rather get notified until we explicitly acknowledge 
the problem.

The check_logfiles plugin does have the capability to continue to report the
error (using its "sticky" option). This is good since then we're notified
longer, but if we then use the Nagios "Acknowledge" link to acknowledge the
problem, new problems (e.g. new errors in /var/adm/messages) reported by the
check_logfiles plugin get ignored.

I asked on the nagios-users list if there was a way to acknowledge a problem 
reported by a plugin like check_logfiles without ignoring future problems. 
Nobody came up with a way, so I assume this is new functionality needed in 
Nagios.

I realize we can syslog an "okpattern" string and check_logfiles will then 
clear, but I'm looking for something using the Nagios web (and external 
command_file) interfaces. Using the Nagios "Acknowledge" link would be ideal, 
since that's what folks are going to be using to acknowledge other problems.

I'm using Nagios version 3.0.5 and check_logfiles version 2.4.1.3. We configure 
check_logfiles as a volatile service and use state staulking.

Thanks for providing these great tools! Please let me know if something doesn't 
make sense or if I'm missing something.

-- Jim

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