Service Configuration Question

Paul L. Allen pla at softflare.com
Wed Mar 24 12:36:17 CET 2004


Andreas Ericsson writes: 

> I totally disagree. If the plugin fetches disk status input from nsclient 
> or nrpe (or snmp, for that matter) and can't get it, it's a critical error 
> (service not running).

Think it through.  Assume check_by_ssh is used to check disk space on
a remote machine.  Further assume that sshd on the remote machine is
down.  There is a critical problem because sshd is down, but you already
know that because you're using check_ssh to test whether or not sshd is
up, right?  The state of the disk, however, is UNKNOWN.  In this situation
you don't know what state the disk is in, whether it is good, bad or ugly. 

The same thing applies however you monitor the remote service.  If
whatever transfers the data about service X is not working then the
status of service X is unknown but the transport mechanism itself is
critical.  Doing things your way confuses the issue and reports a critical
error in the wrong place (the service rather than the the transport).
Doing it your way, if the transport fails you get told that all services
monitored that way are critical (which they probably aren't) when the
actual failure is elsewhere.  Your way means that "sshd is down and needs
to be fixed" would mutate into "everything on that box is dead." 

Of course, by that argument, the Nagios behaviour with passive service
checks is wrong. 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 




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