Re: How to create additional severity levels in Nagios core

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nickjwest
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Mar 22, 2017 11:55 am

Re: How to create additional severity levels in Nagios core

Post by nickjwest »

I am after an answer to the question posted here: https://support.nagios.com/forum/viewto ... 34&t=32619. I require more than CRITICAL and WARNING as, in all honesty, it's not that much use.

The problem with 2 level severities is its all or nothing - its either really important or it's not so. I have traditionally, on many other systems management platforms, ONLY used Critical to mean just that i.e host or service down. However, underneath that i need to have other levels that take into account things that are MINOR or MAJOR, to use general parlance.
For example, i have a disk resource and i want to give a gentle nudge when it reaches 85% capacity so i will configure a MINOR alert. When its gets to 98% its obviously more urgent and should be MEDIUM. Also, applications also have a number of different conditions that they report on that can be more than 2 levels of severity. Also, in defining SLA's you either have really urgent and not so urgent to which all events will correspond to and that means that you potentially have loads of WARNING events that need dealing with all within the same time frame.

I think i read that someone said it would require a code rewrite, which i think probably is the case, but i would like it done as right now Nagios is lacking there...
tmcdonald
Posts: 9117
Joined: Mon Sep 23, 2013 8:40 am

Re: How to create additional severity levels in Nagios core

Post by tmcdonald »

This isn't a simple change. All of the plugins that exist right now, in addition to Core itself, the reporting engine, check agents, pretty much all code everywhere is designed to use the OK/WARNING/CRITICAL states for services, and it is not as simple as just adding another state (or many).

Adding this capability would require a major version release and would most likely break backwards compatibility, so while it has been on our radar for a while this is not a priority.
Former Nagios employee
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