[Nagiosplug-devel] Improved check_oracle (TS check with autoextend)

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Sir,

I am writing to thank you for your letter and say,

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 10:12:53AM +0100, Poitschke Kai wrote:
> Hi Ton,

 ... snip

> (without that UNKNOWN thing which caused nearly a flame war here).

There are edge cases that make it less obvious whether to return UNKNOWN
or CRITICAL.

I think it was a useful to hear other views about the matter but to sum 
up this thread, it seems I there are three important factors

1 View/situation of the local Nag admin and the relationship of that
person with those responsible for the 'managed nodes'

In my case, spurious alerts undermine the tenuous position Nagios
occupies in an organisation that really wants to buy a shrink-
wrapped big name product that, they believe, will do all they want
without any effort.

2 Notification policy. If ones notifies on UNKNOWN then objections to
not being informed about significant events is less relevnt

3 Run time errors. These happen unfortunately and unless the plugins
have a _good_ test regimen (that I have not seen and could not
construct), are unavoidable.

I think that the default stance of the Nagios infrastructure handling
plugins should be that for plugins that fail to generate output or
return a bogus return code, Nag retuns UNKNOWN since nothing can be
concluded about the state of the service apart from the plugin used to
monitor it needs some examination.

Yours sincerely.


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stanley Hopcroft
------------------------------------------------------------------------

'...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...'

from Meditation 17, J Donne.