I am trying to figure out a sane way of doing service/host depenency checking in nagios.
the scenerio is i have a large number of hosts, with a various service checks. i would like to have all the hosts depend on say a ‘dns’ server, and if that server is down, not to perform any service checks. also, i would like service checks to depend on say ‘ping’, that way if the machine goes down im not getting notifications for all services, just ping.
any ideas. the docs didn’t seem to provide examples of doing dependencies like that.
The first thing you should think about is parent/child relationships in your hosts.cfg file if you want to reduce notifications.
For example:
If I have 100 hosts(which are nothing but switches that all connect to each other in a daisy chain) and the first switch in the daisy chain dies, then all other switches are going to be reported as DOWN also. But if you said that switch2’s parent is Switch1, and Switch3’s parent is 2, and so on, then if switch1 dies, you get only ONE device reporting DOWN. The rest are unreachable. You then set your contact to not receive Unreachable notifications.
Host/service dependancies can be used where it’s a real dependancy. Like you said, if the box won’t ping, then of course, the ftp server isn’t going to be able queried.
But the DNS down? Sounds kina weak. The problem with having over 1000 service checks, and building a service dependancy tree, is time. When nagios finds a service that does not respond, it walks the dependancy tree, untill it finds the device that is actually DOWN, and not just unreachable.
Depending on how many nodes you have on your network, this could take alot of time. But if you don’t have many, then it may work just fine.
But they should be legitimate dependancies. Just because the DNS server is not running DNS, doesn’t mean that the FTP server might not be running.
You want nagios to tell you what is broken, not lie to you.
DNS was probably a poor example. Unfortunately, with my current understanding of parent/child relationships, it really doesn’t provide the solution I am looking for.
Looking at the dependency documentation, it looks like I need to create a depenency rule for each service on each host ? I was hoping to just add some kind of rule to the service template. depends_on PING, etc.