Scheduled downtime

[8lb4fmllhm001 at sneakemail.com]

Daniel Foster wrote:
> If I schedule some downtime for a switch on our network, I 
> assume alerts will 
> be suppressed for hosts/services behind (dependencies of) that switch.

I'm somewhat new to Nagios, but that's my take on it.  There's no way you can empirically know what's going on behind a dependant host (switch), unless you have an out-of-band way of reaching that host, in which case it's no longer dependant.  :)

> What will happen if during the scheduled downtime the switch 
> is up, but a 
> service or host behind it fails?  Will we get the alerts?

See below.

> The reason behind this is that the switch will be restarted 
> sometime between 
> 3 and 6 am, so I'd like to supress alerts for then.  
> Obviously the restart 
> won't take 3 hours, so I may wish to receive alerts during this time.

When you go to schedule downtime, take a look at the Command Description on the right side of that page.  Here's my (loose) translation of it, for your scenario:

Schedule the downtime for between 3am and 6am.  Now, how long do you think you'll need to have the downtime?  Just long enough for a restart?  Will 10 minutes be more than adequate?  Then set the duratino for 10 minutes.  And uncheck the Fixed checkbox.

This way, Nagios won't start the downtime window until it actually finds that the switch is down, at which point the timer (10 mins) begins.  After those 10 mins, it adds that host (switch) and all its dependancies back in.  (This all assumes that you begin the downtime after 3am and complete it before 6am.)

Having said this, I'm not certain whether Nagios will flag the downtime as 'complete', if it finds that the tests for the host (switch) are successful (ie, after you bounce the switch).  Perhaps someone has something to add to this...?


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