Adjust timing intervals in nagios

[omally01]

Hello all!

I have nagios up and working great, the only thing I would like to accomplish is to have it notify me after a maximum of 5 or six minutes of an outage. The timing in the "define service" portion in switch.cfg for example has the option to set the normal and retry check interval, but these can only be set as low as 1 minute. And if I watch /var/log/messages I can see that it has to go through about 15 or so soft states and then several hard state checks before notifying me by email. I have also discovered a timing section in commands.cfg, but I can't see to get it to notify me any sooner than about 15-20 minutes after an outage. Does the check times in the service definition override the one in the commands.cfg or vice versa? Is there some other place to change how many soft stats it has to go through before determining that it's a hard down state? Thanks in advance for your help!

Note: using nagios core 3 and I am only using the ping check command at this point.

[jsmurphy]

soft states are the checks that it makes prior to reaching the max_check_attempts defined for that service, as soon as it reaches that number it transitions to a hard state and sends an alert... so if you want to reduce the number of soft states change the above to a lower value.