Hosts with no services?

Dr. Dave Blunt dblunt at kiwiboy.com
Thu Jun 26 05:53:45 CEST 2003


Hi,

I think I agree with Jim.  I guess I don't see why you would care if a
system was up if you didn't care about at least one service - unless
that 'service' is keeping the room warm.  Why not pull the power cord
now?  If you're not responsible for making sure the system is up or
tracking some metric about specific services then why even configure it
in Nagios?

$.02


Dr. Dave Blunt
Manager of Information Technology, Virage, Inc.
411 Borel Ave., Suite 100S
San Mateo, CA 94402

-----Original Message-----
From: nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net
[mailto:nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Carroll,
Jim P [Contractor]
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 5:54 PM
To: Furnish, Trever G
Cc: Nagios-Users List (E-mail)
Subject: RE: [Nagios-users] Hosts with no services?


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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