PING CRITICAL vs. Host check timed out after 30.01 seconds

[VincentF]

Hello all,

As a newbie Linux / Nagios guy, I have FINALLY achieved some level of comfort with my configuration and have gotten some of my hosts responding to pings originating from Nagios.

I am now noticing, however, that some checks on sites are indicating that there is a packet loss and others are Host check time outs. I filtered through the configurations and everything appears to be identical minus the hostname / IP differences.

Two questions:
First - What does the check time outs mean?
Second - How does it get fixed?

Thanks

[npolovenko]

Hello, @VincentF. If the network is very busy hosts(servers) may take longer to respond. But your 30-second timeout seems too large for this kind of problem. Sometimes windows servers are protected from ICMP discovery and you need to turn the setting on in order for them to become ping-able. Another scenario is if the IP address of a network device has changed. Finally, the device may simply be turned off.
Try pinging problematic servers from the nagios console and see if it works. If you see a packet loss consider using the traceroute command or doing a tcp dump.