On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:20:29AM -0800, Israel Brewster wrote: > To some extent, yes, but not necessarily a service we can monitor.
There are cases that fit this description, but I'm not sure if the examples you provide are. > There are quite a few devices on the network that it is important to > us to know should the device fail, but aren't offering any separately > monitorable "service", per se. For example, printers. We need to know > if one dies, so we can fix it before it becomes a problem (not to > mention that fixing the boss's printer before he even knows it has a > problem makes you look good ;-) ), but other than the simple ping host > check, they don't offer any "services" we can monitor. Telnet to 9100 and look for a banner. Or the equivalent for non JetDirect printers.. > Even some more essential devices such as switches can fall into this > category, as they are just routing traffic, not offering any > "services". I could, of course, go crazy and use check_snmp or > something to monitor each port on said switch as a service, but that > is way overkill for our needs- we just need to know that the switch is > there and functioning, i.e. host check. And moving traffic; you might find it useful to ping-check other things on that switch. Or at least ssh-check the switch controller itself. > Not to mention the rather large category of client machines, which we > need to know are running so they can be backed up, and, of course, > used for whatever the user needs. Kind of difficult to monitor the > ability to run office, or an e-mail client :-). We still want to > monitor the host, though, so that hopefully if/when a client machine > should die we can fix it before the user (who may well come in before > us in the morning) is impacted. We could, of course, monitor something > like ssh on those machines, but why? All we (and the user) care about > is that the machine is functioning. Sure. But for workstations, you're not monitoring diskspace? Open TCP listens (to watch for trojans) > So yeah, while this may not be the way nagios is designed to work, and > may never be (which I can live with if so), I really don't see this as > being all that unusual a situation, as some responses seem to imply. Well, it's not that it's unusual, I think; I believe the assertion being made is that only doing a ping is not the Best Practice. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] Designer +-Internetworking------+---------+ RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates | Best Practices Wiki | | '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA +-http://bestpractices.wikia.com-+ +1 727 647 1274 If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Nagios-users mailing list Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null