Nagios acknowledgement enhancement request... revisited

Jim Winkle jwinkle at doit.wisc.edu
Wed Nov 19 21:14:48 CET 2008


I wrote last week suggesting an enhancement to Nagios so it would 
send notifications *even if* a problem had been acknowledged, provided
the error string returned by the plugin had changed.  At the time, I 
was talking about the check_logfiles plugin, but I realize that at
least one core plugin would benefit from this as well.

The check_disk plugin is one such example.

Right now, even using state staulking and configuring check_disk as 
a volatile service, Nagios will only notify about the *first* full 
disk if a user acknowledges the problem. If a second disk fills later, 
we won't be notified.

The second full disk does show up in the web interface, but no 
notifications are sent out. It seems like the state of the web 
interface should match the notifications.

What if the first disk was an unimportant disk that occasionally fills
and is no big deal so the problem was acknowledged, but the second one 
is more important? By default, we'll get no notification for the second 
disk.

Yes, adaptive monitoring could be designed to handle this (thanks again
for those suggestions), but why not have it work out-of-the-box?

I'll repeat the implementation suggestion that I think makes the most sense:

> If Nagios would store the string that the plugin returned
> when a user clicks "Acknowledge", then if the plugin returns a *new*
> CRITICAL string, Nagios would go thru it's notification routine, run event
> handlers, etc. When the user again clicks "Acknowledge", Nagios stores this
> new string (discarding the old) to be ready for the next problem.

This would make it easier for people to get started with Nagios. Many people 
may not realize that they won't be notified for subsequent failures that a 
plugin reports, and that they have to do something special in order to get 
notified.

Any possibility of this being implemented at some point?

-- Jim

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