Services on down hosts

[Andreas Ericsson]

Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> Stupid question of the week: 
> 
> I see that Nagios 3 represents as CRITICAL services on hosts which are
> down.
> 

Those CRITICAL tests are actually test-results. Since sometimes host
checks fail horribly for other reasons than them actually obtaining
an answer and that answer passing some sort of threshold, Nagios will
keep running service checks for the host the same way it always has,
but notifications for the services are suppressed.

> Since most services are OK-WARNING-CRITICAL; ie: ascending points on a
> numeric continum which *cannot be measured if the host is down*,
> wouldn't it make more sense if those services went UNKNOWN if the host
> wasn't running?
> 

No. UNKNOWN is reserved for when plugins get fed nonsense arguments,
or can't, due to some really weird errors, complete the check it's
supposed to do (such as getting IO errors when trying to write to
a network socket).

> Ok, I guess I can see both approaches to that as being sensible in some
> circumstances; is there a knob to change that behaviour for a service,

No.

> or something less obvious than a knob?
> 

Yes. Write an event-broker-module that upon a hard host-state change
alters the state of the services on that host to whatever you like.
You also need to prevent the status from changing in later service
checks, or you'd only have a very short period of time when the services
are actually in the state you pick.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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