How often does Nagios need restarting? (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)

[Kustner, Tom]

Jamie, 

Sorry for the very tardy response - it's been busy.  Two responses to
all your good comments:

1.  The problems with Nagios "slacking on the job" were confirmed by the
Nagios administrator.  Permanently, he is looking to move the setup to a
box with more memory (it is currently a Red Hat box).  Temporarily, he
talked about using cron to restart it every night.  Since it's been more
responsive lately, I have a feeling he has done just that.  

I did ask if he thought whether upgrading the NSClient would help, since
we are currently using NSClient++ 0.3.1 and NSClient++ 0.3.6 was just
released, but while encouraging me to try out 0.3.6, he feels memory
constraints on the current box is the cause of the problem and nothing
else.

I didn't post any configs files because I am not the Nagios
administrator and don't have access to the configs or the box itself
except for what I am allowed to see for our hosts via http.  Thanks for
letting me know 2.9 is relatively stable and that it, in all likelihood,
is not the cause of the problem.

2. Thanks for pointing out that host checks are not always performed
unless a service has been detected has failing.  I value the service
checking, but I assumed it was also pinging the host on a regular basis
and that is apparently not the case.  I come from the background of
using products such as Insight Manager and OpenManage which are
vendor-specific solutions that have their limitations but which
automatically perform pinging on a regular basis.  I'll look at the
documentation for information on getting that set for us.  It explains
my frustration as to why a server can reboot and Nagios not detect it.

Thanks again for taking time.

Tom Kustner MCSE, CNE 
Inside:     68728 
Outside: 414-906-8728 
Mobile:  414-559-0889 

-----Original Message-----
From: James Pratt [mailto:jpratt at norwich.edu] 
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 8:23 PM
To: Kustner, Tom
Cc: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: RE: [Nagios-users] How often does Nagios need restarting?
(Quiscustodiet ipsos custodes?)

Hi Tom, I've tried to answer your questions to the best of my own
personal knowledge -I have replaced any  of your original "*" symbols
with my own on all my comments/thoughts below, since my MS outlook
client apparently just sucks, so this appears more readable.

Regards,
jamie

-----Original Message-----
From: Kustner, Tom [mailto:Tom.Kustner at RetirementPartner.com] 
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 5:35 PM
To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Nagios-users] How often does Nagios need restarting?
(Quiscustodiet ipsos custodes?)

I am a Nagios user, not the administrator.  We are running Nagios 2.9 on
RHEL 4 or 5.  Overall, 200+ hosts with 3000 services being monitored. I
have access for monitoring a smaller number of hosts.

* ok, understood...

In another posting, I alluded to an issue where a host had gone down but
no alert was sent out.   The issue surfaced again today and as was done
the other time, Nagios was restarted to "fix" the problem.   I am
naturally concerned about the unreliability.  

* did you get any on-list or off-list replies at all? You have not
mentioned if you had it resolved or not, but it sound like the answer is
no to possibly both(?)

Any thoughts on this problem?    Specifically:

What are best practices for making sure Nagios does not fall down on
the job?   Is there something not set right?

* Understanding your setup and the way nagios works is how you ensure it
stands up... a mis-config sounds likely, but who knows...

Are other Nagios administrators restarting Nagios on a weekly or
nightly basis to keep it on the job?

* Heck no! That's why we run it on Linux or Solaris! :)

Is this an issue specific to Nagios 2.9?  Was 2.9 a spotty version?

*Not to my knowledge - all stable releases have worked very reliably
here, especially 2.9 now that I look back...

For a given host, why would "active checks" be enabled, yet "N/A"
appears in the "Next Active Check" field?

* RTM - host checks are not always performed unless service checks fail,
and since I've been a manual-slacker myself, that may not even be the
true correct answer (Marc? :)

Thanks for any help.

-Tom Kustner-

* Not to sound negative/condescending or anything like that, but your
install will truly only work as well as you have maintained
it/understand it. You should really look at your current config files
and read the manual on 2.9, or upgrade to 3.x and again rtm...  Also,
you have not sent anything specific related to your problematic
config(s) for anyone on this list to even guess either way whether or
not something is mis-configured. If you are concerned about posting your
configs/setup, change stuff properly to hide what you need to on-list.
(I apologize if I have missed your earlier posting. Many here try our
best to help people here when possible, but sometimes we are all busy at
the same time, who knows!?).

Cheers,
Jamie


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