Can I monitor a host without defining any services for it?

[Thomas Guyot-Sionnest]

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On 07/08/08 04:09 AM, Ian Masters wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I was wondering about the necessity to define a service for hosts that I
> just want to ping. As far as I understand, the default Host Check
> Command, check-host-alive, is a ping check and looking at my scheduling
> queue, these checks are being done regularly but when I verify my config
> files Nagios always warns me about the hosts which have no services defined.
> 
> So I looked in the documentation and found this:
> http://www.nagios.org/faqs/viewfaq.php?faq_id=39
> 
> On that page Ethan Galstad says:
> You really need to define at least one server per host that you plan on
> monitoring. Although you can define a host and not assign any services
> to it, you will not get the results you are expecting. Nagios is
> primarily geared towards monitoring services - hosts are only checked
> when there are problems or recoveries with services, so things will go
> awry if you define a host without any services.
> 
> The above FAQ was written in 2002. Is this still true?
> 
> Since the host is already being checked by the Host Check Command, it
> seems redundant to specify a ping check as a service.
> 
> Do all you Nagios admins define a ping service, if you only want to
> check if a host is up or down?

You can use check_dummy for the service... In Nagios 3 with regularly
scheduled hosts checks it should work.

In Nagios 2 hosts check were normally on-demand so it wouldn't work if
your service always returns OK.

- --
Thomas
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