Nagios Support Forum

About 90 minutes ago Nagios started reporting "Return code of 24 is out of bounds" as critical on over 2800 services. Over 5000 services were unaffected.

I restarted the monitoring engine and they are slowly clearing up.

Does anyone know why that might have happened?

This is an odd return code, you could try checking the nagios log and see if you were hitting a limit of some sort prior to the restart:
What were the services monitoring which were affected, what plugins were they using?

The log ends with several recovery notifications. I'll look further up to see what I can find.

The services being affected were monitoring Environment, Memory, and Port Status for Cisco switches. The plugins are check_snmp_environmental.pl, check_snmp_mem.pl, and check_ifoperstatus.

Does your nagios environment have anything touching, or having to do with HP-UX? That return code is an error message for too many files opened, it would make sense that when you restarted it cleared the issue.

Doing a bit of research, some systems return 24 if there are too many files open.

You may be able to find a clue in you syslog /var/log/messages

No HP-UX in the environment.

Nothing obvious stood out in the logs, so I'm going with too many files open. A service restart fixed it. I'll watch it over the next few days and see if it happens again.

Thanks for the help, everyone!

Yes, do post back if this reoccurs

Nothing has happened like this again, so you can close this issue.

Thanks for the help.

Sounds good, marking the thread as answered.