Hosts with no services?

Carroll, Jim P [Contractor] jcarro10 at sprintspectrum.com
Thu Jun 26 02:54:28 CEST 2003


I suppose you could use check_dummy for your service check.  Caveat:  I've experienced hosts which are pingable but are otherwise worthless/dead.  You've stated yourself that you need to know that the box is alive.  So what constitutes 'alive'?  If I can ping a box but a user cannot login to that box, is it still alive?  If I can't ping the box but when I walk over to it, there are blinking lights and whirring fans, is it still alive?  If the main HDD activity light is flickering but bashing away on the console doesn't get me any response, is it still alive?  (These are purely rhetorical questions.)

If you'd like to know within 5 minutes that a user cannot use service XYZ, then configure Nagios to monitor the health of that service and check on it frequently.  If you don't mind that a user cannot login to a host between 5pm and 9am, then configure Nagios to not bother checking between those times (thus cutting down on 'unnecessary' CPU and network traffic).

If you don't mind that your root filesystem is sitting at 99.99% capacity, then don't bother with check_disk.  If you don't mind the load average hitting 20 frequently, then don't bother with check_load.  If you don't mind that a HDD is starting to complain about bad blocks, then don't bother with check_log2.

Yes, I'm playing devil's advocate here.  If after everything I've said you still find keeping a finger on the pulse of the corporate systems to be uninteresting, then take another look at check_dummy, and replace the check_ping service with it.  (Bonus:  You'll cut down on network traffic and remote processing.  ;)

jc


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Furnish, Trever G [mailto:TGFurnish at herff-jones.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 2:16 PM
> To: Carroll, Jim P [Contractor]
> Cc: Nagios-Users List (E-mail)
> Subject: RE: [Nagios-users] Hosts with no services?
> 
> 
> But why should you monitor something you don't care about, generating
> needless traffic and cpu overhead?
> 
> I too do a ping in the host check and a redundant ping 
> service check - but
> it's still a waste.  Sure there are other services on the 
> box, but I don't
> need to monitor them -- all I need is to know the box is 
> alive, in which
> case the extra ping is pointless and wastes resources.
> 
> In a previous life I did this with a little shell script and 
> fping.  You
> lose the benefit of being able to acknowledge individual 
> hosts that way
> though.  Then again, if you allow your techs to log into the 
> system doing
> fping, then adding a host a file listing those to ignore becomes easy.
> 
> -t.


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