Nagios Support Forum

Hello everyone,

I am looking to configure my Nagios Core server to do a few things. First, I want all states to be in the "critical" state before any updates are received. I thought that this was done via the "initial_state" argument for the service, but when I start up the server all states go to OK despite nothing sending any updates (passive checks). Second, I want to make a state go to critical or unknown if no update is received within some period of time (2 minutes?). I thought this was done through freshness, but I can't seem to get that working either. The documentation isn't helping me much with getting the configurations I want to work. I do not have any active checks configured they are all passive.

Thank you!

I have at least figured out a work around. Here it is and my only explanation.

If you turn on freshness checking and set an interval it will run the check command. The default check command is check_dummy with an argument of 0. This sets the service to OK. So, if you change the argument on the check command to check_dummy to reflect the default state you want the service to be in if no updates have been received or the service is stale, 0 - ok, 1 - warning, 2 - critical, 3 - unknown.

With this option, all services come up as "pending" until a single check result is processed, then all services with no updates will go to the state specified. Once services go stale they will also transition to that state.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any real documentation on check_dummy. I am guessing it just sets the current service to the state you specify.