Hi Jayson, Thanks for the suggestion but '-C' just limited it to the 4 processes that I'm interested in, but it still says "OK". Reducing "-w" to "1" is the only way i can get a warning out.... even though top is still showing the offending process pinned around 100% and it's not yo-yo'ing..... <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 5:45 PM, Jayson Broughton <<a href="mailto:jbroughton@truecos.com">jbroughton@truecos.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div link="blue" vlink="purple" lang="EN-US"> <div> How about the –C flag? ./check_proc –w 10 –c 20 –C ApplicationName –metric=CPU ~Jayson <div style="border-style: solid none none; border-color: rgb(181, 196, 223) -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color; border-width: 1pt medium medium; padding: 3pt 0in 0in;"> From: Craig A [mailto:<a href="mailto:tabmow99@gmail.com" target="_blank">tabmow99@gmail.com</a>] Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 2:01 PM To: <a href="mailto:nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net" target="_blank">nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net</a> Subject: [Nagios-users] monitor cpu usage... </div><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"> Hi all, I've looked at the documentation, at the mailling lists, and googled around, and don't explicitly see it so thought i'd try here.... On our system, I've set up nagios and it's monitoring a few things (http, etc) just fine. However, one of our applications is giving us grief and sometimes starts consuming >80% of a cpu (it's a quad-core machine). So i'd like to set up a monitor to see how often this happens and to get notified. Looking around, it seems like 'check_procs' with the CPU metric should do what i want. However, it doesn't seem to behave quite as I'd expect. If I look at 'top' on this linux system, for our 'problem' application, i see this (and it will be constant like this for > 1 hour): PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 20022 ourapp 18 0 1428m 1.0g 13m S 104 25.7 442:18.39 java So when I run this command, I'd expect to see 1 process flagged: [root@ours libexec]# ./check_procs -w 10 -c 20 --metric=CPU CPU OK: 173 processes I've tried adding the '-u' flag but made no difference. Is there something I'm missing if I want to capture and be notified when a process goes above a certain CPU usuage (ie. 80%)? Any help or information you could provide would be appreciated. Thanks </div></div></div> </div> The information in this electronic mail message and any attached files is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, delete this message and contact the sender immediately. Access to this message by anyone other than its intended recipient is unauthorized. You must not use or disseminate this information as it is proprietary property of the True companies. Communications on or through the True companies' computer systems may be monitored or recorded to secure effective system operation and for other lawful purposes. Thank you.</blockquote> </div>