Nagios Support Forum

We have a service check that sent us >1400 emails this weekend that I've been tasked with determining the root cause. I'll preface this by saying that I updated Nagios XI to version 5.5.2 late last week. It fixed one issue from 5.5.0 that I was hoping for, but I'm wondering if this is another potential bug in 5.5.2.

At first glance, it doesn't look like it's a configuration issue. The check I'm using is check_xi_service_http_cert, and three of the website certificates we monitor dropped into the "warning" window, thus alert emails. Based on the configuration, it appears that these should be sending every 2 hours.

I noticed that we got alert emails every 2 minutes for each of those three sites, all weekend. The alert's configured such that it should be every 120 minutes, but I believe that they sent every 120 seconds.

I've attached a screenshot of this service/alert setting, let me know if anything else is needed. Is there any validity to what I'm seeing, or is it possible that this is a configuration issue easily remedied?

Hi, @matt_ps. Looks like if you change the Notification Interval from 60 to any other value, Nagios will take it in seconds.

Notification interval

This directive is used to define the number of "time units" to wait before re-notifying a contact that this service is still in a non-OK state. Unless you've changed the interval_length directive from the default value of 60, this number will mean minutes.

I went ahead and updated the Notification Interval to 86400 (the number of seconds in a day) on that page that I sent the screenshot from, and continued to receive alerts every 2 minutes (see attached screenshot). It doesn't appear that field is what's causing these alerts to send. Is this notification interval that you recommended updating somewhere else, other than on the service configuration?

@matt_ps, Please ignore my previous statement. I looked into this further and this line:

Unless you've changed the interval_length directive from the default value of 60, this number will mean minutes.

Actually refers to the directive in the nagios.cfg file, and not to the Notification Interval on the screenshot.

So you can change the notification interval back to 120.


And let's check the interval length in your nagios.cfg file with the following command:

cat /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg | grep interval_length