Additional states in Nagios

[Kevin Keane]

Actually, there are four states reported by plugins: OK, WARNING, CRITICAL and UNKNOWN. Services will have the same four states.

There are also three states that hosts can have: UP, DOWN, UNREACHABLE. UP, DOWN and unreachable depends on the state reported by the plugin, as well as the state of parents. http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/hostchecks.html

HARD and SOFT states are separate from all of that. You can have a soft warning or a hard warning, and a soft critical or a hard critical. http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/statetypes.html

OK, WARNING, CRITICAL and UNKNOWN are the actual state of whatever you are monitoring. The plugins decide which state it is. HARD, SOFT, as well as UP or DOWN, are computed by Nagios based on the status reported by the plugins. Exactly how Nagios does that is configurable.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason W. [mailto:jwellband at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2010 7:18 PM
To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Nagios-users] Additional states in Nagios

(I've tried Googling for the answer, but there seems to be some ambiguity in defining terms - even in the Nagios docs)

I've got Nagios monitoring a bunch of things on our servers and I also have events being sent to Nagios via passive checks. This is all useful information to us as sysadmins, but there is a difference in criticality, e.g. is is down, is it about to go down, or is it purely informational?

The latter is what I am writing about. Currently, there are two "states" we use - WARNING and CRITICAL. This is the ambiguous part since the docs refer to states as HARD or SOFT, but the plugin API docs refer to WARNING and CRITICAL as states. I realize there is also UNKNOWN, but with non-technical people occasionally looking at our Nagios, that may lead them astray...

Is there a way to get more states, e.g. INFORMATION?  This would allow one to sort by state in the web interface. Currently, we use WARNING for most informational messages, so there is a mashup of "Service X is about to die" and "Server Y did something you may want to know about"

I am guessing not without hacking the source, but I can dream ;)

Thoughts & comments appreciated - even if it's to say I'm Doing it Wrong.

--
HTH, YMMV, HANW :)

Jason

The path to enlightenment is /usr/bin/enlightenment.

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