[Nagiosplug-devel] more info on network management plugins

[Guy Van Den Bergh]

On Wed, 2002-09-11 at 21:03, Subhendu Ghosh wrote:
> Sorry - don't mean to be nit-picking...
> 
Don't worry, discussion is good :)

> > 
> > *) 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 :)

You have a point, but anyway you can choose in the nagios config whether
you want a notification on admin down or not. If an interface is admin
down, it is (probably) done through manual intervention, maybe even for
a good reason. I still think it is good to treat admin down and
operational down differently.

> 
> 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.  

That's true, but I tried to find a balance between nms uptime, snmp
traffic and monitoring the correct interface (read on!).
> 
> 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.
> 
It is indeed possible to provide only ifName or ifDescr, and get the
correct index from the router with snmp. But I think this might be a
problem on routers with a large number of interfaces. Excessive traffic
can be solved by storing a mapping ifName->ifIndex locally and let the
plugin use this data when available. But I'm not sure whether this is a
good idea for plugin performance. Any ideas?
Another possibility is to get the index when only ifName or ifDescr is
provided, use the index directly when provided, and ultimately make the
comparison as I am doing now when both are 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.

I'd rather wait for that to be really sure the host is down.
You can have a condition where a link is lost, which makes a router
unreachable. I will receive 2 notifications: host down and interface
down (on the router still reachable). You will get at least 3
notifications with ifoperstatus.pl (one interface down and at least one
unreachable and one host down). xinterface can return all states:
unknown, ok, warning and critical; ifoperstatus only returns ok and
critical, and unknown on a condition which will not be met very often
(plugin timeout instead of snmp session timeout).

> > 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.
> 
Welcome aboard ;) I was thinking of transforming the two plugins into
functions, and make the check_router_env decide whether it should call
the cisco_env function or the juniper_env function. Any suggestions?

Many greetings,
Guy