Getting too many Nagios notifications

[Matthew Joyce]

Sage words Jim.
I've found myself adding services over the years, the other day I
started writing a script to analyse the service dependencies of a
windows server and generate service and service dependencies.
Luckily, in moment of clarity I realised it was getting out of control.

Now I take the attitude; what are the fewest things I can monitor to
adequately determine the health of this infrastructure.

Matthew Joyce 
02 9382 0051 | IT Manager | Children's Cancer Institute Australia for
Medical Research 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net 
> [mailto:nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf 
> Of Lane, Jim
> Sent: Wednesday, 14 March 2007 12:11 AM
> To: Guy Rosen; nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Getting too many Nagios notifications
> 
> It strikes me that this is more of a philosophical issue than 
> a technical one. It's easy to get carried away with all the 
> myriad of things that Nagios can check on and end up with a 
> monster, as you seem to have. The question you need to ask 
> yourself is "what event is likely to happen and how would 
> Nagios be able to recognize it and tell me about it"? It 
> sounds like you have an all-or-nothing situation, your server 
> is either up or it slowly goes down one bit at a time. If 
> that's so perhaps you really only need to monitor the server 
> itself. To me the point of Nagios is to be like a fire alarm. 
> Once the alarm sounds I'll investigate the details myself, I 
> don't need Nagios to tell me in great detail of everything 
> that's not working on a server. 
> 
> FWIW
> 
> Jim Lane 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net
> [mailto:nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf 
> Of Guy Rosen
> Sent: March 13, 2007 8:50 AM
> To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [Nagios-users] Getting too many Nagios notifications
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have a simple setup running Nagios 2.3.1 (actually 
> NagiosVMA, configured using Groundwork Monarch). I have a 
> host with many services on it (both remote checks performed 
> using check_by_ssh and checks for various public services), 
> and I get a barrage of notifications whenever something goes wrong.
> 
> So, I defined dependencies. The services in a host are 
> dependent on the host (and/or on the PING service, and some 
> other general services). But, there are some timing issues 
> that mean I still get hammered with a lot of alerts.
> What
> happens during outages it this:
> 1. The host itself goes down, but not before a few services 
> manage to go down individually (so I get a few service down 
> notifications) 2. More services that go down when the host is 
> down do not generate any notifications - good.
> 3. When the outage is over, Nagios detects the host is up.
> 4. Now the services are detected as going up, and since the 
> host is up there is no dependency to filter the 
> notifications, so I get a whole barrage of "service OK" notifications.
> 
> These are killing my cellphone :-). Can anyone direct me to 
> the best way to better configure these things?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> 
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