Alerting based on past-to-current trends?

[Ian Ehrenwald]

Hello
I was wondering if there was a straight-forward way to alert based on an average of past data plus a current perfdata entry.  I understand I'm not explaining it very well that way, so here is the real-world example I am working with -

I am polling a set of machines via SNMP for CPU load every 1 minute (looking at hrProcessorLoad).  If the return value is at or above 95%, send out a WARNING.  If the return value is 98% or above, send out a CRITICAL.  The problem here is that it's OK for a process to take up 100% CPU for multiple seconds, and sometimes that high CPU usage coincides with the SNMP %CPU query, so I get a lot of false alerts.

Is there a way to use past perfdata in conjunction with the current returned data to generate an average and send a WARNING or CRITICAL based on that new number?  I only care to get alerted from Nagios if, for example, the %CPU has been at 100% for 5 minutes.  Or am I just way over-thinking this and should be monitoring 1m, 5m, 15m UNIX load averages (which doesn't seem that accurate anyway)?  What are other people doing to monitor CPU usage and alert on abnormal long periods of utilization?

Thanks for your help.

				Ian Ehrenwald


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