On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] schrieb am 28.11.2005 14:06:26:

I have about 20 servers, for which I have no specific services to monitor, but which I am interested in their host status, ie the check_command in the host entry in the hosts.cfg file is set to check-host-alive.

However, it appears that the host check_command is never executed, and
availability for the host is always Undetermined - Insufficient Data 1d
0h 0m
0s 100.000%

Also the status in Host Status detail is always pending, though there are no other checks configured for this host.

If I explicitly add a check-host-alive for the host in a service configuration, then the host appears as up in the Host Status Details list, but obviously I would expect it to appears as UP due to the check_command

Any ideas on whether this is the expected behaviour for the check_command directive?

It is the expected behaviour.
Nagios is a network monitoring tool, not a host-only monitoring tool.
It actually expects that a host must have a kind of service running
to be useful - which is more or less true in 99.99% of the cases ;)
Therefor nagios works like this:

1. do the defined service-checks on all defined hosts
2. IF and only IF one of those checks fail, then issue a check_host_alive
to see if it's a problem with the service or if the host is down

It is safe to assume that a host is alive if its services are responding.
Checking the host for being alive again is redundant unless one of its
services fail.

So you need to set up some kind of services for each host to have them
appear as "UP". Though there _is_ a configuration option to enforce
check_host_alive checks, but alas I cannot remember it. Your best friend
is the documentation in this matter. (or just look through the configfile
and check for this particular option)

You can use check_interval in the host definition to force regular host checks, however the documention says clearly that you should avoid this as much as possible.

I'm a little curious to why though. Just as the OP I have a lot of hosts that has to real services, so I only monitor it though a simple ping. Currently I have it setup redundant with a check_ping service and a check_host_alive host check, but I think it would be cleaner to only have regulary scheduled host checks instead.

My check_host_alive host command is running:

check_fping -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -w 5000,100% -c 5000,100% -n 1

while my check_ping service command is running

check_fping -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$ -n 5

so only one ping packet will be sent for each host check (if the host responds) so the host check should even be faster than my service checks are with my current config. Is it still true that I would get a performance penalty by removing my service checks for these hosts and enabling a regularly scheduled host check instead? If so, why?

Or is this statement about it beeing a performace penalty only true when you have other service checks scheduled that is normally executed much faster than the old default host check that would have waited for several pings before returning and thous causing a significant delay?

PS: I'm running Nagios 2.0b5

//Mathias


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files
for problems?  Stop!  Download the new AJAX search engine that makes
searching your log files as easy as surfing the  web.  DOWNLOAD SPLUNK!
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637&alloc_id=16865&op=click
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null

Reply via email to