System Table Overflow Issue

[jeffbusz]

Relatively new to Nagios, but I have many years of systems administration experience. I am getting a critical alert on one of my servers with the System_Tables service:

System Table Overflow Issue with: open filesCRITICAL - proc-sz=271/4200, proc-ov=0, inod-sz=953/8192, inod-ov=0, file-sz=1470/2147483647 file-ov=0

The command line that is run is: $USER1$/check_nrpe -nu -t 30 -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c check_systables.

The last time this happened, there were several nrpe processes that were trying to run. I killed all nrpe processes and started one and it resolved the issue. This time there is only on nrpe process running. I restarted it, but it did not seem to clear is issue. Anyone have any ideas as to what could be causing this?

Thank you for your time.

[jeffbusz]

I was able to figure out the problem. It appears that the maximum-size of the system file table was the maximum integer value allowed in a shell script. When calculating the limits, 90% would return a 0 instead of the correct value. After hard coding the warning and critical limits into the script, it started working fine.

[tmcdonald]

Good catch! Glad you got it working and I hope this helps someone else out in the future.

I'll be closing this thread now, but feel free to open another if you need anything in the future!