[Nagiosplug-devel] more info on network management plugins
Subhendu Ghosh
sghosh at sghosh.org
Wed Sep 11 12:04:58 CEST 2002
Sorry - don't mean to be nit-picking...
;)
On 11 Sep 2002, Guy Van Den Bergh wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> It took a while, but here is some more info on the network management
> plugins I submitted to the list about a week ago.
>
> 1. What has check_xinterface to offer over check_ifoperstatus.pl?
> (I have developed check_xinterface because check_ifoperstatus didn't
> really do what I wanted.)
>
> *) check_xinterface considers also the administrative status of the
> interface: when the interface is admin down, only a WARNING status is
> returned (CRITICAL when admin up & operational down).
Is this logical? - often we have interfaces installed on devices that are
not in use and therefore admin down. If monitoring a specific interface
(therefore assumption is that it should be up), why would the interface go
admin down - (if maintenance then scheduling downtime ...)
Inadvertent change of admin to down should get flagged on your
configuration diffs (You are doing those, right :)
>
> *) check_xinterface needs the ifIndex as well as the ifName as input
> options. This offers a method to detect when interface indices have
> changed, e.g. after a reboot (recent Cisco IOS versions support ifIndex
> persistence, but this is not always available; I do not know what a
> Juniper router does with the indices after a reboot).
By requiring both ifIndex and ifName in the config file you are forcing a
nms reconfig because of a router reboot with snmp reindexing. Seems to me
to be at cross-purposes in trying to maintain nms uptime.
The current version of check_ifoperstatus supports either ifIndex or
ifDescr for the interface. It could be improved to use ifName instead of
ifDescr if the -I (support for ifXTable) is provided.
>
> *) check_xinterface returns UNKNOWN when the snmp poll fails
> (check_ifoperstatus returns critical). SNMP implementations on
> commercial routers are pretty stable. Most of the time an SNMP poll
> failure means the router is down, and this is detected with the
> check-host-alive command.
True - but having a critical here allows for faster notification rather
than waiting for the host-check max-attempts to expire.
>
> 2. The router environment plugins.
> It is indeed a good idea to fold both check_cisco_env and
> check_juniper_env into a single plugin, but I will need some more time
> to implement this. This way it should be easily extensible with other
> proprietary environment MIBs (Foundry, Unisphere, Alcatel, ...)
>
I can give you a hand on this, if you'd like.
--
-sg
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