Proposal about initial states for new hosts/services
Ton Voon
ton.voon at altinity.com
Wed Jun 18 13:00:54 CEST 2008
Hi!
I want to generate some discussion about this particular proposal
where new hosts/services are given an initial state, rather than left
in a PENDING state.
PROBLEM
There is no initial state for hosts and services. This means that the
NDO database doesn't "know" what the first state is - queries that
join against the state tables are ignored. Also, the
nagios_statehistory table doesn't have an initial state making
querying for reports via the database a lot harder.
This is in Nagios 2.10, but I don't believe there have been changes to
this in Nagios 3.
POSSIBLE SOLUTION
Nagios, on creating objects and seeing that there is a new object,
goes through the servicecheck result logic to give an "initial state"
result, which I propose as being OK for services and UP for hosts.
DISCUSSION
I think Ethan wanted to be more "correct" and say that a new host/
service is in a PENDING state because there had never been a result
received. If you assume a service is OK and the first result is a
CRITICAL, then there is this period where it looks like there was an
OK. However, there are inconsistencies and complications to this.
Complication is that extra logic needs to be placed to cater for
pending states - we have it in the CGIs and the result logic and lots
of other places. Similarly, in the state information in NDO, there are
no entries for new hosts.
There's also inconsistency in the way reports find the first state.
The reporting CGIs, reads the INITIAL_SERVICE_STATE in the nagios.log.
In there, for services that have never had a result, it marks it as
OKAY with "Assumed to be okay". So already there is the concept of an
Assumed okay result.
What are the downsides? For a new active check, it could be marked as
okay instead of a failed state, but then the period is relatively
small. For a passive check, I think it is fair to assume that the
result is okay until marked otherwise.
Is this a good idea? Is there something I've overlooked?
Ton
http://www.altinity.com
UK: +44 (0)870 787 9243
US: +1 866 879 9184
Fax: +44 (0)845 280 1725
Skype: tonvoon
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