Service Configuration Question

Michael Eck meck at chilitech.net
Tue Mar 23 14:50:05 CET 2004


Unless my source is not authoritative in this matter, plugin return 
codes can also be used to communicate to Nagios when a value has 
surpassed a certain threshold.  See the Nagios plug-in development 
guidelines for more information on what I'm talking about 
(http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net/developer-guidelines.html).

Further, checking an SNMP gauge and reporting OK merely on the 
condition that proper parameters were passed to the plugin and some 
value was received by the check would make for a totally worthless 
checking logic.  How would Nagios know the difference between an 
acceptable and unacceptable value?  The plugin behavior that you 
describe makes sense for services like SMTP, HTTP, etc., when a timeout 
could be either a service or a host problem (or something in between) 
but doesn't seem appropriate for checking things like used disk space, 
temperature, or some other gauge type value.

Here's a cut of the table about which I wrote from the guidelines.  
This is the understanding that I have of the return codes:
Numeric Value Service Status Status Description

0 - OK - The plugin was able to check the service and it appeared to be 
functioning properly

1 - Warning -The plugin was able to check the service, but it appeared 
to be above some "warning" threshold or did not appear to be working 
properly

2 - Critical - The plugin detected that either the service was not 
running or it was above some "critical" threshold

3 - Unknown - Invalid command line arguments were supplied to the 
plugin or the plugin was unable to check the status of the given 
hosts/service
On Mar 22, 2004, at 4:50 PM, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> Service checks that aren't subject to user-error should return 
> critical when experiencing network problems (no data received, for 
> instance).
> UNKNOWN should only be returned when bad parameters have been passed 
> to the plugin, or when the files or directories the plugin depends on 
> are missing.
>
> Because of a lot of the plugin authors fail to conform to that 
> standard, nagios has a hard time doing The Right Thing and keeping 
> users happy at the same time.
>
> Michael Eck wrote:
>> Is there any way to configure a service so that Nagios only performs 
>> the host check when a particular non-OK state is returned by the 
>> service check?  For example, I have a service check that, when in a 
>> critical or warning state, the host is necessarily up (it's an SNMP 
>> value), but when in an unknown state the host may be down.  My 
>> problem is that Nagios is performing too many host checks on hosts 
>> that are clearly up but in a non-OK state.  I'm either missing 
>> something in the check logic, missing a configuration directive, or 
>> Nagios can't do this.
>> Thanks for the help.
>> ----
>> Michael Eck
>> Chilitech Internet Solutions
>> Network Operations Center
>> 570-323-2166
>> http://www.chilitech.net
>> -------------------------------------------------------
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>> ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when 
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>> being sent to /dev/null
>
> -- 
> Mvh / Best regards
> Sourcerer / Andreas Ericsson
> OP5 AB
> +46 (0)733 709032
> andreas.ericsson at op5.se
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials
> Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of
> GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system
> administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click
> _______________________________________________
> Nagios-users mailing list
> Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
> ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when 
> reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk 
> being sent to /dev/null
>
----
Michael Eck
Chilitech Internet Solutions
Network Operations Center
570-323-2166
http://www.chilitech.net
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