disable notifications or use passive checks

[jh129666]

We are doing a backup/restore from our prod nagios server to our DR nagios server. For the host/service monitors on the DR nagios server, would it be better to disable notifications or use passive checks?

Thanks,

Jeff

[tmcdonald]

Disabling notifications would reduce the load and prevent duplicate emails, and receiving passive updates from the main XI server would keep your servers synced without running each check twice.

I would also check with [email protected] to make sure you are operating within what the license allows, in terms of activations per license.

[jh129666]

To make sure I understand, you're saying to disable notifications on the DR XI server as well as setting up the prod XI server to send passive updates to the DR XI server, is that correct?

For sending passive updates, do I configure outbound checks on the prod XI server and inbound checks on the DR XI server?

[tmcdonald]

To make sure I understand, you're saying to disable notifications on the DR XI server as well as setting up the prod XI server to send passive updates to the DR XI server, is that correct?

That will depend on your licensing. Each license is good for three activations: One active/master/production, one inactive/slave/backup, and one testing/development. Only one can be performing meaningful work (monitoring and alerting) at a time, which will be the role of the active/master/production server. The inactive/slave/backup can run checks against the active/master/production and step in if it detects it has gone down. This is where the "receiving passive updates from the main XI server" bit comes in, so the two servers are synced even though only the main is performing checks. The testing/development server is just for trying out upgrades or new plugins before attempting to do so on your active/master/production server.

If you have two licenses, then each one could have an active/master/production server doing half the checks, or both can do all the checks, really however you want to architect it.

For sending passive updates, do I configure outbound checks on the prod XI server and inbound checks on the DR XI server?

That is the way I usually recommend, yes.

[jh129666]

Thanks for your feedback as this is good info.

With our license, we currently have an active/production and inactive/DR, and only the production one is doing monitoring/alerting.

If I configure passive updates, do all the updates made to prod XI get sent to DR XI?

[tmcdonald]

If I configure passive updates, do all the updates made to prod XI get sent to DR XI?

The inbound/outbound syncing will only take the checks performed by the master, and send those results to the slave. Things like users, dashboards, and configs will not be replicated. For that, you might want to look into an automated backup+restore on a cron: https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf

[jh129666]

I'm doing a daily automatic backup/restore from prod to DR, so if I do configure passive updates won't that configuration on the DR side get wiped out by the restore?

[tgriep]

That is correct, if you do a backup on the Active System and to a restore on the DR system, it will overwrite the DR system's settings.
If you don't want the DR system doing checks and sending notifications, you could disable them globally after the restore and the licensing would be correct for the DR server.