Scheduled service state resets

[Sapon, Dimitry]

Hi there,
 
I have an interesting requirement to fulfill. I have about 100 passive
only service checks that need to be reset (currently to Unknown state)
at a specified time of day (currently midnight). The reason they need
this done is to be able to easily tell if the passive checks have
occured on that day (because they return either one of the three other
possible states).
 
I came up with two possibilities of doing this: crontab or enable active
service checks 5 minute before midnight for those services, and use a
command that sends a notification to the service using send_nsca. Here
are the ups and downs of each approach:
 
Crontab
Pros

*	Simple to setup scheduling
*	Can run multiple scripts easily
*	Control over the entire reset state process (once crond gets the
script going)

Cons

*	Cumbersome to configure which services need to be notified (need
to implement my own config file separate from Nagios, create logic in
bash to read it, update it everytime there is a change etc.)

Nagios Command through active checks
Pros

*	Simple to setup scheduling
*	Logic for which services to reset is easily configurable through
service template definitions used for those services. Changes in the
future are easily made and done in one place as opposed to two with the
crontab version.

Cons

*	By having Nagios send out parameters to a script that runs a
send_nsca command via an "active check" method, Nagios expects the check
to return information back to it. The "active check" basically returns
an OK (Hard) state with the output being the commands I passed to my
script. A few seconds later, Nagios processes the send_nsca command and
changes to the new state (Unknown in this case). So as you see, Nagios
goes through 2 hard state changes and two possible notifications. Now I
will disable notifications on unknown but I do have it setup to notify
on recovery as people need to get emails when a passive check returns an
OK state. So with this method they'll get a notification at midnight for
every service setup like that basically because it's been reset. Even if
I could get away with not having to send any notifications other than
the two other hard non-OK states, it still doesn't make sense to bombard
Nagios with an extra state change for every service setup. Just spells
bad news if this ever needs to be scaled imo.

Conclusion
I was very happy with setup 2 until I discovered that major con. That's
the rason I stated that with the crontab I have full control over the
entire process (other than what's handled by the other daemons necessary
for crontab to work). I really don't feel like setting up a separate
process, script, and config files, causing multiple locations to be
updated to handling something so simple. I'm hoping I overlooked some
easier solution that you guys can recommend.
 
Waiting to hear back from you...
 
Regards,
Dimitry
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