Nagios Support Forum

Seeking a recommendation. The other day, circumstances aligned to make cronned rsync processes fail to end on an AIX Host. After some time, crond created too many processes and started failing to start new tasks. This cascaded into a world of other issues.

We'd like to use Nagios to warn us if this might happen again. I'm looking for possible methods using NRPE or NCPA to do one of the following:

* Alert when there are too many (10+) processes
* Alert when there are too many cron or rsync processes
* Alert when an rsync process is over X hours old

Any suggestions?

You'll need a custom plugin to get the amount of time a process is running, but npca will be able to tell you how many total processes are running and how many of them are cron or rsync:

./check_ncpa.py -H <remote_ip> -t '<your token' -M 'processes' -w 5 -c 10 -q ''
./check_ncpa.py -H <remote_ip> -t '<your token>' -M 'processes' -w 5 -c 10 -q 'name=cron,name=rsync,combiner=or'