[TriLUG] Availability reporting: nagios vs big brother

[Paul G. Szabady]

Thanks to all that answered.  This was very helpful.

ps: I hope your thunder gets returned in good shape.  ;-)

-- 
Paul
@ Thy Service

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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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