Jamie, Sorry for the very tardy response - it's been busy. Two responses to all your good comments:
1. The problems with Nagios "slacking on the job" were confirmed by the Nagios administrator. Permanently, he is looking to move the setup to a box with more memory (it is currently a Red Hat box). Temporarily, he talked about using cron to restart it every night. Since it's been more responsive lately, I have a feeling he has done just that. I did ask if he thought whether upgrading the NSClient would help, since we are currently using NSClient++ 0.3.1 and NSClient++ 0.3.6 was just released, but while encouraging me to try out 0.3.6, he feels memory constraints on the current box is the cause of the problem and nothing else. I didn't post any configs files because I am not the Nagios administrator and don't have access to the configs or the box itself except for what I am allowed to see for our hosts via http. Thanks for letting me know 2.9 is relatively stable and that it, in all likelihood, is not the cause of the problem. 2. Thanks for pointing out that host checks are not always performed unless a service has been detected has failing. I value the service checking, but I assumed it was also pinging the host on a regular basis and that is apparently not the case. I come from the background of using products such as Insight Manager and OpenManage which are vendor-specific solutions that have their limitations but which automatically perform pinging on a regular basis. I'll look at the documentation for information on getting that set for us. It explains my frustration as to why a server can reboot and Nagios not detect it. Thanks again for taking time. Tom Kustner MCSE, CNE Inside: 68728 Outside: 414-906-8728 Mobile: 414-559-0889 -----Original Message----- From: James Pratt [mailto:jpr...@norwich.edu] Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 8:23 PM To: Kustner, Tom Cc: nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: RE: [Nagios-users] How often does Nagios need restarting? (Quiscustodiet ipsos custodes?) Hi Tom, I've tried to answer your questions to the best of my own personal knowledge -I have replaced any of your original "*" symbols with my own on all my comments/thoughts below, since my MS outlook client apparently just sucks, so this appears more readable. Regards, jamie -----Original Message----- From: Kustner, Tom [mailto:tom.kust...@retirementpartner.com] Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 5:35 PM To: nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Nagios-users] How often does Nagios need restarting? (Quiscustodiet ipsos custodes?) I am a Nagios user, not the administrator. We are running Nagios 2.9 on RHEL 4 or 5. Overall, 200+ hosts with 3000 services being monitored. I have access for monitoring a smaller number of hosts. * ok, understood... In another posting, I alluded to an issue where a host had gone down but no alert was sent out. The issue surfaced again today and as was done the other time, Nagios was restarted to "fix" the problem. I am naturally concerned about the unreliability. * did you get any on-list or off-list replies at all? You have not mentioned if you had it resolved or not, but it sound like the answer is no to possibly both(?) Any thoughts on this problem? Specifically: What are best practices for making sure Nagios does not fall down on the job? Is there something not set right? * Understanding your setup and the way nagios works is how you ensure it stands up... a mis-config sounds likely, but who knows... Are other Nagios administrators restarting Nagios on a weekly or nightly basis to keep it on the job? * Heck no! That's why we run it on Linux or Solaris! :) Is this an issue specific to Nagios 2.9? Was 2.9 a spotty version? *Not to my knowledge - all stable releases have worked very reliably here, especially 2.9 now that I look back... For a given host, why would "active checks" be enabled, yet "N/A" appears in the "Next Active Check" field? * RTM - host checks are not always performed unless service checks fail, and since I've been a manual-slacker myself, that may not even be the true correct answer (Marc? :) Thanks for any help. -Tom Kustner- * Not to sound negative/condescending or anything like that, but your install will truly only work as well as you have maintained it/understand it. You should really look at your current config files and read the manual on 2.9, or upgrade to 3.x and again rtm... Also, you have not sent anything specific related to your problematic config(s) for anyone on this list to even guess either way whether or not something is mis-configured. If you are concerned about posting your configs/setup, change stuff properly to hide what you need to on-list. (I apologize if I have missed your earlier posting. Many here try our best to help people here when possible, but sometimes we are all busy at the same time, who knows!?). Cheers, Jamie The information contained in this message and any accompanying attachments may contain privileged, private and/or confidential information protected by state and federal law. Penalties may be assessed for unauthorized use and/or disclosure. This message and any attachments are intended for the designated recipient only. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately and return or destroy the information. This e-mail transmission and any attachments are believed to have been sent free of any virus or other defect that might affect any computer system into which it is received and opened. 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