Services on down hosts

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 08:19:14AM +0200, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 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.

Aha.  So they show up as CRIT, but if the host was already notified as
DOWN, then I won't get paged for the services as well.  Ok; that's not
too bad... (though I haven't actually set up notification yet :-).

> >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).

Well, since (to take an example), CRITICAL load means "a loadaverage
over 8" (on my 8-core Opteron), and we don't *know* the load average if
the machine isn't reachable to return a value...  then the nrpe checker
on the console in fact *is* getting an IO error when trying to, ok,
read from a network socket.

> 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.

IOW: this is not something lots of people are clamoring for.  Got it.

I think if I'm going to invest a lot of work into code, I'll spend it
reskinning the clunky looking cgi's instead.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com                     '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274

	     Those who cast the vote decide nothing.
	     Those who count the vote decide everything.
	       -- (Joseph Stalin)

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