Issues with Flexible downtime scheduling and execution.

[yo_marc]

Hello Nagios Support,

Over the weekend I scheduled approximately 6-hours of flexible downtime (spanning a 6-hour window) for a rather large number of hosts (350+) due to some network maintenance. Some hosts stayed up, many went down. I saw strange behavior in two areas:

• 1) When flexible downtime executes, it seems to be ignoring any custom Duration entered in the Scheduled Downtime tool. The tool is (somewhat silently) using the default setting of 2-hours for the DOWNTIMESTART and DOWNTIMEEND notification window.
  
  2) When I submit a flexible Scheduled Downtime for a Host, the information that is shown for my Scheduled Downtime listing doesn't show the Duration I entered manually upon submission; it shows the Duration of the Flexible Downtimes possible Start and End window. (Maybe this is expected.)

I ran a test which I hope is a good example of both issues...

Here are the parameters I used when submitting the Host downtime:

Code: Select all

    Triggered By:      None
    Type:              Flexible
    Duration:          0 hours  45 minutes
    Start Time:        11:03:55
    End Time:          12:00:00
    Child Hosts:       Do nothing…
    Services:          Do nothing…

As seen in the Scheduled Downtime tool:

Code: Select all

    Host:           my_host.example.com
    Service:        -
    Entry Time:     2018-01-08 11:04:29
    Author:         <myself>
    Comment:        Patching and Rebooting my_host.example.com
    Start Time:     2018-01-08 11:03:55
    End Time:       2018-01-08 12:00:00
    Type:           Flexible
    Duration:       56m 5s
    Downtime ID:    65
    Trigger ID:     None
    In Effect:      Yes
    Actions:        X

My feedback: I would expect to see 45-minutes listed as the Duration… but I can see why 56m 5s is shown. It’s the span between Start and End times. Should that 56m 5s downtime-window be shown as the duration here, or should I see the custom 45-minute Duration I set when scheduling the downtime?


As seen in the my_host.example.com Host overview, Acknowledgements and Comments section:

By <myself> at 2018-01-08 11:04:29
This host has been scheduled for flexible downtime starting between 01-08-2018 11:03:55 and 01-08-2018 12:00:00 and lasting for a period of 2 hours and 0 minutes. Notifications for the host will not be sent out during that time period.

My feedback: This "2 hours and 0 minutes" is definitely unexpected. At first glance I would think it's a bug... but I actually think this is showing the correct Duration that Nagios truly sees and acts upon - assuming that my custom Duration upon submission is ignored like I suspect. In the end my DOWNTIMESTART email was received at ~11:07am and the DOWNTIMEEND email was received at ~1:07pm... 2-hours later. Not the 45-minutes like I expected.

Am I doing something wrong here, or is this something that needs further investigation?

XI 5.4.11

Thanks,
-marc

[npolovenko]

Hello,@yo_marc. Thank you for the detailed feedback, much appreciated! We were able to reproduce this behavior on a newer versions of XI as well. Bug tracking id was assigned #12890. And we expect this to be fixed in the nearest release.
Regards

[yo_marc]

Awesome! Thanks for the quick review and action on this.

[npolovenko]

@yo_marc, Great! Keep an eye on the changelog:
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... NGES-5.TXT
Also, for the time being, you can schedule downtime via service/host status page, under the advanced tab.