How to deal with hosts that are not always on

[Werner Flamme]

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Marc Haber [29.07.2012 10:51]:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a number of hosts that are not always turned on, such as my 
> Notebook, my home server (which sleeps if not used) and a number
> of test VMs. To get a reasonable volume of checks in my test
> installation of Nagios, I would like to have those machines
> monitored by it.
> 
> Obviously, I have notifications for those hosts turned off. This, 
> however, leads to non-zero numbers in the critical, warning and 
> unknown fields in the CGI, which gives a wrong impression of my
> health status since it is normal and expected that those
> hosts/services are down.
> 
> Is there any solution for this dilemma? Can I have Nagios monitor 
> hosts without reporting them as down when they are down?
> 
> I know this may sound strange, but I would like to have statistics 
> about how long the machines have been up and when.


Marc,

we use action handler scripts to schedule downtime in this case.

As an example, a downtime for a service is scheduled for 6 minutes if
$1 is CRITICAL and $2 is HARD. That is the maximum amount of time this
service needs to be restarted (via nrpe, in the same script):

/usr/bin/printf "[%lu]
SCHEDULE_SVC_DOWNTIME;host5.example.com;Host5;`date +%s`;$((`date +%s`
+ 6 * 60));1;0;0;serveradmin;Service on Host5 is restarted\n" `date
+%s` > /var/spool/nagios/nagios.cmd

Following
<http://old.nagios.org/developerinfo/externalcommands/commandlist.php>, you
can send the command DEL_SVC_DOWNTIME if the service is up before the
scheduled downtime ends.

The same should be possible with SCHEDULE_HOST_DOWNTIME or
SCHEDULE_HOST_SVC_DOWNTIME and DEL_HOST_DOWNTIME.

So Nagios will still see the downtime, but since it is marked as
scheduled downtime, your statistics may look better ;-)

HTH
Werner

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