[TriLUG] Availability reporting: nagios vs big brother

[Chris Knowles]

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Paul G. Szabady wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> I have a question related to the server availability reporting in big
> brother vs nagios.  We currently use big brother, yet when there's an
> outage, we disable monitoring.  This minimizes email and paging noise
> while working on the issue(s).  The downfall is that the availability
> report data gets skewed and doesn't show an accurate representation of
> server uptime.  Does nagios have the ability to stop paging, but continue
> monitoring so that the availability reports are accurate?  According to
> the manual, it seems to be that way, but I'd like to make sure before I
> suggest moving from BB to nagios.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
In a nutshell, yes.

"Checks" which is Nagios' term for the monitoring of a service/host and
"notifications" which would be the e-mail/page/IM/RSS that tells you
when there's are a problem are completely separate in Nagios.

In the detail for a host or service you have the option of disabling
either checks or notifications.  At my site we LART anyone who disables
checks.

Also, Nagios has the features of Downtime and Acknowledgments.

Downtime allows you to specify a time period not to send out alerts for
the host/service to send notifications.  Check data will still be
processed.

(In nagios 1.3 (the Debian default) downtime does not trickle from the
host to the services on that host.  meaning that if you schedule
downtime for a host and the host is up for part of that time but a
service is not up, then nagios will page you about the service being
down.  Nagios 2+ claims (I've not tested it myself yet) to fix this.)


Acknowledgments allows you to simply say I know about this problem, stop
whining.  It will supress all further notifications until the status
changes.

I note that while I've been typing a "Joyner-esque" length e-mail two
others have jumped in and stolen my thunder.

CJK
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