Nagios Support Forum

As we didn't receive emails for some services, I disabled flapping for them. Now it seems one of these services still has a flapping state and I seem unable to clear this state. I submitted 10+ passive check results to the service, so that the state change percentages is now 0%. But the service still has a flappign state.
So how can I remove the flapping state for this service?

I installed 5.2.7 today and rebooted and the flapping state is not going away.. Is this a known issue. Seems like that when flapping is disabled, services that already had the falpping state never get rid of it?

EDIT: I tried many things, such as re-enabling flapping and submitting a lots of OK results, but was not able to make the flapping state go away. So now I removed the service and copied it from a service which did not have this issue afetr which the problem was solved.

I think this might be a bug, but we haven't (to my knowledge) heard this before. I'll have it tested and update the thread.

The alternative is to edit the retention.dat file, but that's messy.

Just letting you know we filed an internal feature request ID 8522:

We discussed internally that it would be a good idea to clear the flapping state when disabling flap detection

Keep an eye out on future Core releases.

Since a feature request has been submit, is it ok if we close this thread?

To add on, we weren't able to replicate 100% what you showed, but we did note that disabling flap detection leads to a situation where the state was stuck to whatever it was prior to disabling, but for us re-enabling did allow it to go away. I would double-check your service and see if you can force this behavior, as none of us were able to.

Just to add on to this thread, i just ran into this scenario:

Service1 - Forgot to disable flap detection when added it
Active che3cks are disable
have a script that submits passive result with a specific message for an alert
script then submits passive result resetting back to OK


Well, after that scrip was called enough times it went into flapping state. I noticed and disabled flap detection. The flapping state never went away and i had to enable flap detection and submit many passive results to get it below threshold. Flapping reset and I then disabled detection again.

@BanditBBS I tried recreating this issue again, but no luck. I disabled active checks on a Ping service, and made sure that the flap detection is NOT enabled. Next, I submitted bunch of passive check (CRITICAL & OK) until the service went to a flapping state. Then, I enabled flap detection. The "Service is flapping between states" message" disappeared, but the "State Change" didn't clear out (it was over 20%). I had to submit about 20 "OK" passive checks until the "State Change" percentage dropped below 5%.