Host checks instead of service checks

[Jim Avery]

2009/3/16 Deborah Martin <Deborah.Martin at kognitio.com>:
> Hi Folks,
>
> Currently, the main nagios box (running old version of SuSE) and Nagios
> 2.0b4 is running just with service checks, one of which is an ssh check (we
> don't allow ping)
>
> So in the web interface, I see all hosts as up.
>
> However, I've built a new box (which hopefully will replace the above) with
> SLES 10SP1 and Nagios 3.0.6. I've put the same config files (services.cfg
> and hosts.cfg)
>
> on the this new system. But now the hosts all show as "Pending". So I then
> moved the ssh check from a service check to a host check and can see that
> the more hosts I move the  less hosts are pending. That's good so far...
>
> But, when I run the pre-flight check (/usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -v
> nagios.cfg), I now get warnings to say some hosts don't have any service
> checks associated with it!
>
> This is true as some nodes will only have ssh checks against them whilst
> others will have other checks against them. I'd rather it didn't warn me as
> I have hundreds
>
> of hosts appear in the pre-flight check warnings and it now looks incredibly
> untidy to see all this.
>
> How can I get rid of these warnings ?
>
> I'm probably missing something here so any help would be appreciated. I'm
> wondering for example, if I should force the initial state to be UP for
> hosts rather than moving the ssh service check to a host check. But then what would happen if
> the service check found a node was down - would it reflect that in the "host
> problems" ?

You're right, it wouldn't.  For the host check, you need some method
of checking if the host is up.  If ssh is the only method at your
disposal to check if a host is up, and there are no other services you
can monitor as service checks then my humble opinion is you're best
off specifying ssh for both your host and service checks on those
hosts.  I am allowed to use ping, so I do.  For those nodes on which I
monitor no services, I also use ping as the service check - to me
that's functionally equivalent to using ssh for both, it's just a
different service.

If you're monitoring other services and you're only using the ssh
checks to see if the host is up or not, then I'd recommend just using
the ssh check as a host check, leaving the others as service checks.

I wonder, though, if it might be possible for you to check the host
using a passive check?  For example you could have cron send a check
using NSCA from your server every minute and use freshness checking to
see if the host is down or not.  I can't say I've ever tried it but
guess it's another option worth thinking about.



Cheers,

Jim

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