Switching to passive checks instead of active ones?

Ivan Fetch ifetch at du.edu
Fri Oct 5 09:44:47 CEST 2007


HI Sam,

On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Live Great wrote:

> Hello Ivan,

> I believe the host check can only be done via a Nagios agent installed 
> in the remote host or via check_by_ssh.

    BY host check, do you mean the host check which Nagios does when it 
finds services are unavailable?

    We will leave the host check (the Nagios check-host-alive command) 
defined as ping.  I believe that if the passive checks become stale, 
Nagios will trigger the active host check.  We also will likely have at 
least one active service check (say, for SSH) - if that service becomes 
unavailable, the host check will be triggered too.



> You said you want to replace check_by_ssh, why are you doing so?
> Most customer don't want a specific monitoring agent installed in their 
> server (a remote host in Nagios' slang).

    Besides the reasons I gave in my initial post, we are looking at it 
this way: Plugins (for checks like disk space, RAID controllers, volume 
management, mail queues, process checks) exist locally on the hosts 
anyhow.  Pushying check results to Nagios keeps us from having to open up 
new inbound connections (NRPE) or allowing key-based SSH logins from the 
Nagios server to our hosts.   We're not so strict that this "push; agent 
approach" is absolutely necessary on all hosts, but we do have some hosts 
which we would like to keep more closed and secure.


    I'm looking for folks who are using, or have significantly explored, 
the passive service checks on this level.  I can experiment and reach my 
own conclusions, but there are also a lot of good folks here who have done 
more with Nagios than I.



Thanks,

Ivan.


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