Nagios Support Forum

Hi

I need to survey a single process's use of cpu, and to put up notifications for this.
Because sometimes we have a java process going wild, and using up almost all of the cpu capacity.
I am using ncpa to monitor it

This is my check command:
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_ncpa.py -H 10.117.55.6 -t 'DC-vest' -P 9991 -M 'processes' -q 'name=java_ase' -w 60 -c 100
OK: Process count for processes named java_ase was 1 | 'process_count'=1;60;100; 'cpu'=0.15%;;; 'memory'=12.85%;;; 'memory_vms'=5.98GB;;; 'memory_rss'=1.06GB;;;
Processes Matched
PID: Name: Username: Exe: Memory: CPU
-----------------------------------
23906: java_ase: aseuser: 12.85 % (VMS 5.98 GB, RSS 1.06 GB): 0.15 %

Total Memory: 12.85 % (VMS 5.98 GB, RSS 1.06 GB)
Total CPU: 0.15 %

I can see it should be possible to set this up because of this 'cpu'=0.15%;;;
That indicates that it should be possible to set some limits on CPU, but I can't find any documentation on how to do that?

You can add filters to the check so that it only includes processes that exceed certain memory or cpu usage. For example, I'm applying filters to return the number of processes that match test.exe and have a memory usage of 80% or more: Then -c 1 so that if it finds even ONE of them exceeding the threshold, it'll result in a critical.

Most checks accept "critical" and "warning" thresholds with lower and upper bounds in the form of [LOWER]:[UPPER]. That is, if critical=1:5, then if it's outside the range of 1-5 inclusive (for example 0 or 7), it'll consider it "critical." When UPPER is empty, it assumed it's Infinity. Likewise, if LOWER is empty, it's assumed to be 0.

Most of the time, you can disable the critical and warning by simply not specifying them. But if you're dealing with a check script that has a default critical or warning threshold if not specified, you can use the value critical=0: to disable the check from going critical.

NCPA API reference

Hi

Sure this can give me an warning/critical if this process exceeds a specific limit.
But then I need to make 3 checks like this

To give me a warning:
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_ncpa.py -H xxx.yyy.zzz.www -t 'DC-vest' -P 9991 -M 'processes' -q 'name=java_ase,cpu_percent=0.1' -w 0

And this to give me a critical:
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_ncpa.py -H xxx.yyy.zzz.www -t 'DC-vest' -P 9991 -M 'processes' -q 'name=java_ase,cpu_percent=0.1' -c 0

And one like this to follow the specific process:
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_ncpa.py -H xxx.yyy.zzz.www -t 'DC-vest' -P 9991 -M 'processes' -q 'name=java_ase' -c 0:1

The reason for the 2 first is that you can't check on the cpu usage, you can only check for the number of processes that exceed the cpu usage limit defined by your filter statement.

And this is not a nice way of doing checks.

The nice way of doing those checks would have been something like this:

/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_ncpa.py -H xxx.yyy.zzz.www -t 'DC-vest' -P 9991 -M 'processes' -q 'name=java_ase' -cprocammount 0:1 -wcpu 85% -ccpu 95% -wmem 25% -cmem 50%

Then you would have had only one line with seperate alerts for specific topics.

And in a nagiosxi system with 20k checks then it matters if you should add 2 extra checks for each of the 2000 servers.

Something else you can do is write your own plugin for NCPA to execute remotely. Put runaway_process.sh in /usr/local/ncpa/plugins and put a shell script like this in it:It should show up in the NCPA wizard automatically.