Request new functionality: "Off Hours" state.

[Larry P. Schrof]

Hello,

I work for a trading firm, and upper management has begun to have a
solid appreciation for Nagios and what it can do. However, we have a few
requirements in a monitoring solution that I would love to see
added to Nagios, as I think they would be useful to the community at large.
I'll put forth one idea per email.

Request for new functionality:
------------------------------

Right now, for the sake of discussion, let's assume a service is
checked from 8:00am to 4:00pm every five minutes. Assume, at 3:57pm
that a service is in the critical state.

The problem our company has is this: The Nagios CGI's will continue to
report the service in a critical state from 3:57pm THROUGH the "off
hours" until the next morning. This "pollutes" the displays with a red
critical entry that we don't want to see. Manually submitting (or
scripting) a passive check just after 4pm to set the service back to
an 'Ok' is unacceptable, as our folks want to know, at a quick glance,
what "should be currently monitored" and "what shouldn't be."

What we need / would like is a per-service and per-host configuration
option that allows a host or service to enter an "Off hours" state in
the CGI displays. (Or perhaps there should also be a global option for this?)

It would be nice if performance data would not be gathered during this
state. (Perhaps that's the way it works now - haven't checked.)

I am even envisioning a new color for the service / host entries in
the CGI's - perhaps blue. This color would readily allow folks to identify
entries that are in "off hours", as opposed to processes that are
being monitored and in an 'ok' state.

I do realize that many folks do want to know / see the last state of
their services before the time_period expired, but in our case, it is
important that we explicitly have the last known state wiped from the
CGI's once the time_period has expired. Our service response team
doesn't want to have 40+ red, yellow, or orange entries showing up for
hosts that aren't even currently in their active time_period.

Maybe it would just take a host / service config entry such as
'display_off_hours_state' ?

Can folks who are intimately familiar with the source code let me know
how feasible this potentially is?

Thanks.
- Larry

P.S. Am unable to subscribe to the list, please explicitly include my
address on all replies. Will keep trying to subscribe throughout the day.

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