Nagios 'Out Of Memory' Problems

[Stephen Barron]

Hi

I had this problem also, and in our case it was NCSA that was filling
up the memory on the Nagios Central Server.  We noticed the problem
increasingly after we installed perfparse, which attempts (poorly) to
stop and restart the nagios process.  The nagios process has to  be
running or the nsca instances will never get processed, and therefore
stay in memory.  I setup a simple process check for nsca and we shoed
at some points 11000+ instances of NCSA, right before having to go to
our data center and give it the old hard reboot.  We use authorized
keys and check_by_ssh to run local checks on the nagios Central
Server, athough a snmp script would also work well.

I would suggest adding a line to your init script for nagios to stop
and start ncsa along with nagios.



ex.
start)
                echo "Starting network monitor: nagios"
                $NagiosBin -v $NagiosCfgFile > /dev/null 2>&1;
                if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
                        su - $NagiosUser -c "touch
$NagiosVarDir/nagios.log $NagiosRetentionFile"
                        rm -f $NagiosCommandFile
                        touch $NagiosRunFile
                        chown $NagiosUser:$NagiosGroup $NagiosRunFile
                        $NagiosBin -d $NagiosCfgFile
                        if [ -d $NagiosLockDir ]; then touch
$NagiosLockDir/$NagiosLockFile; fi
                        #sleep 1
                        #status_nagios nagios
                        /usr/local/nagios/bin/nsca -c
/usr/local/nagios/etc/nsca.cfg -d
                        exit 0
                else
                        echo "CONFIG ERROR!  Start aborted.  Check
your Nagios configuration."
                        exit 1
                fi
                ;;


killproc_nagios ()
{

        if test ! -f $NagiosRunFile; then
                echo "No lock file found in $NagiosRunFile"
                return 1
        fi

        NagiosPID=`head -n 1 $NagiosRunFile`
        kill $2 $NagiosPID
        killall -9 nsca
}

Good Luck

Steve


On 3/24/06, Marco Ramos <mramos at co.sapo.pt> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I had some out of memory and forking problems a while ago. After some
> debugging I've tunned some parameters, namely service_reaper_frequency
> and max_concurrent_checks.
>
> Maybe this URL will help you: http://www.nagios.org/faqs/viewfaq.php?
> faq_id=115
>
> HTH,
> Marco Ramos
>
> On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 13:51 -0800, Armistead, Raffy wrote:
> > I am not sure exactly what process is causing it to run out of memory.
> > Since I have it as a dedicated Nagios system I would imagine it is
> > Nagios that is causing a problem. This occurred when we had about 4000
> > devices but very seldom and it wasn't much of an issue then. Now that we
> > almost have 7000 devices that are being monitored it is happening more
> > frequently. Since this was the case I had assumed it was Nagios but
> > didn't know how to go about fixing the problem.
> >
> > I do not know that much about Linux so I am not sure how to go about
> > setting that up. How do I setup ulimits for memory utilization? What
> > steps would I go about to monitor memory utilization for the Nagios
> > server?
> >
> > I had checked the nagios.cfg file and I do have that setting at -1:
> >
> > command_check_interval=-1
> >
> >
> > I appreciate any help. Thanks.
> >
> > Raffy
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Marc Powell [mailto:marc at ena.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 11:12 AM
> > To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> > Subject: RE: [Nagios-users] Nagios 'Out Of Memory' Problems
> >
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:nagios-users-
> > > admin at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Armistead, Raffy
> > > Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 12:23 PM
> > > To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> > > Subject: [Nagios-users] Nagios 'Out Of Memory' Problems
> > >
> > > I have a problem with my Nagios server constantly crashing. It keeps
> > > outputting on the screen Out of Memory errors which causes loss of
> > access
> > > to the server. I can ping the box but I cannot SSH or web into it to
> > view
> > > any information. This has been happening increasingly more lately. Now
> > it
> > > is about every 2-3 days that this is occurring. We have been adding
> > more
> > > and more devices to the servers and this problem has been increasing
> > as
> > > this occurs. This is how I have it set up.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > I have a Main Nagios server that is running the latest 2.0 (stable)
> > Nagios
> > > release. It is monitoring about 6800 devices but it is not actively
> > > checking the devices. Its main role is to provide a web interface and
> > > receive passive polls from three other servers which do the polling.
> > The
> > > main server also does email notifications when a device goes down. The
> > > server sends about 30-40 emails a day. I am using NSCA 2.5 between the
> > > server and the client Nagios servers. I am only monitoring one service
> > for
> > > each device which is either TCP or ping depending on the device.
> > Mostly
> > > all devices are monitored with TCP (roughly 6000). The rest are
> > monitored
> > > with ping. The individual servers are pretty evenly spread with the
> > number
> > > of devices. They are about 2000-2500 each.
> > >
> > > Can someone please help me in resolving this problem? Thanks
> >
> > Have you determined what process is using the memory? One of the first
> > steps you should take is to set appropriate ulimits for memory
> > utilization for that user so that it doesn't bring down the server. I
> > would configure nagios to monitor memory on that server then use top or
> > ps to identify the process(es) using the allocated memory when memory
> > utilization is high. That will provide better direction for
> > troubleshooting rather than simply that the machine is crashing due to
> > memory exhaustion. The nagios deamon itself isn't going to be using a
> > lot of RAM (10M on my box with 3400 passive services).
> >
> > My somewhat unfounded guess is that perhaps nagios isn't reaping the
> > results from NSCA frequently enough so you're having a backlog of ncsa
> > processes. Each process uses just a little memory but if you have
> > thousands of them then it adds up. I've personally experienced this on a
> > machine that was experiencing disk problems. If this is the case, beyond
> > a hardware problem or capacity issue, I'd verify that your
> > command_check_interval is set to -1 to make sure that nagios is checking
> > the external command file as quickly as it can.
> >
> > --
> > Marc
> >
> >
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--
Steve


-------------------------------------------------------
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