Nagios Support Forum

Hi

I have had Nagios core running for sometime just doing a basic ping test for all devices.

Today I have played around with setting up a few devices that need to be pinged every 8 hours instead of our normal 10 seconds.

To do this I have created the following:
A services called 8-HOUR-PING
A new hostgroup called Paxton-Door-Controllers
A host which is a member of the Paxton-Door-Controllers hostgroup
I've excluded the Paxton-Door-Controllers hostgroup from the normal ping.

On the nagios webadmin I see the host and it has a single service called 8-HOUR-PING

My question is related to the "Next Scheduled Active Check:" when I click on the host.
The next check on the host page seems to be every 20 mins (See image below) However, if I click on the 8-HOUR-PING service for this host it says the next check will be in 8 hours (see below) Can anyone tell me if the host will be pinged every 20mins or every 8 hours?

When the device is pinged it sounds a bleep so I need to ensure it is pinged only once every 8 hours.

Thanks

Hosts are checked independently of services. If you want an 8 hour check on the host, you need to change the host check interval, not the service check interval.

By the way, your interval is 15 minutes, not 20.

eloyd wrote:Hosts are checked independently of services. If you want an 8 hour check on the host, you need to change the host check interval, not the service check interval.

By the way, your interval is 15 minutes, not 20.

Hi Eloyd

Thanks for your reply.

So in summary if I want to tweak the pinging of a device I change the host check interval and I do not need a new service?

The answer is "it depends on what you want to do."

You do not need to have any service checks if all you are doing is checking to see if a host is available. You can set up Nagios to ping the host every 8 hours and notify if it's not up. But Nagios does not normally check hosts unless a service running on that host comes back with a bad state. You need to read http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/hostchecks.html for more information on how this works.

Armed with that information, you can decide whether you want active host checks every 8 hours or just a service check that runs every 8 hours and on-demand host checks as Nagios thinks appropriate.

@steveallen1987, we haven't heard from you in a bit. Did eloyd's answer work for you?