Hosts w/o services

[Israel Brewster]

On Apr 16, 2008, at 11:25 AM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:20:29AM -0800, Israel Brewster wrote:
>> To some extent, yes, but not necessarily a service we can monitor.
>
> There are cases that fit this description, but I'm not sure if the
> examples you provide are.
>
>> For example, printers.
>
> Telnet to 9100 and look for a banner.  Or the equivalent for non
> JetDirect printers..

Ok, that one might be of some use, in the case where the printer is  
responding to pings (host up) but not accepting connections (service  
down). Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it.

>> Even some more essential devices such as switches...
>
> And moving traffic; you might find it useful to ping-check other  
> things
> on that switch.  Or at least ssh-check the switch controller itself.

Yep, we are - all the hosts connected to the switch. That's not a  
service check on the switch, though, that's host checks on devices  
connected to it. Trying to monitor something like this directly on the  
switch as a service check would just be redundant. Maybe save a few  
seconds,  but if you see all the hosts on the far side of a switch go  
down, while the switch is still up, it should be fairly obvious that  
the switch is having problems :-D

>> Not to mention the rather large category of client machines
>
> Sure.  But for workstations, you're not monitoring diskspace?  Open  
> TCP
> listens (to watch for trojans)

Well, we could, and for some places this sort of through monitoring is  
overkill.

>> So yeah, while this may not be the way nagios is designed to work,  
>> and
>> may never be (which I can live with if so), I really don't see this  
>> as
>> being all that unusual a situation, as some responses seem to imply.
>
> Well, it's not that it's unusual, I think; I believe the assertion
> being made is that only doing a ping is not the Best Practice.

I guess I see your point, in that there is typically something on any  
device which could be monitorable as a service. One could also argue  
that if it could be an issue (such as disk space on a client machine,  
or Open TCP listens), it should be monitored. These are valid  
arguments. However, I would argue that cluttering up your nagios  
display with services that either a) are fringe cases which would be  
quickly noticed anyway, or b) which you really don't care about, not  
to mention the additional network, monitoring server, and client load  
this imposes, is not best practice. Best Practice, in my mind at  
least, is Keep It Simple. Just monitor what you need to in order to  
provide the best service to your clients you can.

-----------------------------------------------
Israel Brewster
Computer Support Technician
Frontier Flying Service Inc.
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
(907) 450-7250 x293
-----------------------------------------------
>
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
> -- 
> Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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