Best Practice: how to do reverse services

[LM-PP1]

Nagios Team,

I have many services that are as critical and unknown. This is because device may or may not get that service or be turned on. What is the best way to get these items to go green? Is acknowledging them the best way to do this?

[benjaminsmith]

Hi @LM-PP1,

If they are down or Nagios is able to communicate, they will remain in an unknown or critical state until they come back up. While they won't become green you can acknowledge the issue to disable notifications or put them into a state of scheduled downtime (will disable notifications). In the case of scheduled downtime, this can be reflected in the availability reports. For example, scheduled downtime would not impact the percent uptime across the network.

The Mass Acknowledgement feature, Home > Incident Management > Mass Acknowledge, is useful for handling this across a large number of hosts or services.

Let us know if you have further questions.

Documents:
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... s%20XI.pdf
https://labs.nagios.com/2014/01/29/usin ... nagios-xi/

[LM-PP1]

@benjaminsmith

I appreciate the information. Is there a way to right a service where the bad state is known good and when it starts reporting data it will become critical? That would let us know if we brought up a spare.

Thanks,
LM-PP1

[benjaminsmith]

Hi,

There isn't a reverse service feature in Nagios XI. However, one option is to disable service checks when the host is down. There is a setting in the main Nagios configuration file for this.

Define in /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg

Code: Select all

host_down_disable_service_checks=1

This will apply globally and will stop checks until the host comes back online. However, it will not make critical states turn to OK.

See: Nagios XI - Service Dependencies

--Benjamin

[LM-PP1]

Hey,

I think this might be more along what I am looking for. I will try it today and get back with you on Monday. I appreciate the help. I was unaware nagios had that setting.

Thanks,
LL-PP1

[dchurch]

Great! Let us know how that goes and if you run into any issues.

[LM-PP1]

How do I know if those checks have stopped?

[dchurch]

If you open up Home (top menu) => Service Status, it'll show a date in the past for when each service check was last run under the Last Check column. If that's more than twice what the Check Interval is, Nagios hasn't sent out that check in a while.

[LM-PP1]

I just checked and I see the that last check has not changed since yesterday when I made the change. Thanks so much. Please feel free to close the ticket.