Nagios Support Forum

One of the NagiosXI in the VM guest OS is CentOS 7.5
VM guest...
CPU: 4 cores
RAM: 16GB
Disk: 80GB
Total checks are about 5,000 (host+service)

What's the average Load Numbers mean? and how they were calculated? how to set those numbers to a reasonable value?

We first set the system check threshold to 5/4/4 but got alert, then we change to 6/5/5, is that make sense? or should set different threshold?

Will the green bar change color if hit the threshold?

Hello xpertech,

There are many explanations of Linux load average at the ready on the internet. The short answer is that the 3 numbers represent the 1, 5, and 15 minute average of CPU load. And CPU load in this context represents the number of processes running or tagged as runnable (queued by the kernel). Generally speaking, if the 1 minute average is higher than the 5 or 15 averages, your load is rising. This is likely the scenario of which you would want to be alerted. So thresholds of 6/5/5 would alert on a relatively slight increase, where thresholds of 8/5/5 would represent a rapid rise in load. All of this said, running a CPU check on a 1 minute interval and comparing the CPU graph with the load averages will help you tweak the thresholds to give you meaningful alerts for load average.

Hope this helps. Thanks for visiting the forum!