[Nagiosplug-devel] Suggestion about SNMP errors

[John Vincent]

On 6/29/07, Andreas Ericsson <ae at op5.se> wrote:
> John E. Vincent wrote:
> > I know this isn't going to thread right because I just signed up for the
> > mailing list but:
> >
> > My opinion on the failure of snmp-agents and honestly all plugin
> > failures is that it should return UNKNOWN.
>
> It doesn't work so well when you're testing a network based service (HTTP,
> SMTP, POP3) and the reason you can't test the timeout value is that you
> get Connection Refused.
>
> For agent/server solutions this might be proper however.

I would wager that  a connection refused or a connection timeout is a
critical scenario for a network service plugin. Maybe what I should
have said is that plugin failures of a nature that get back invalid
data or were called improperly should return UNKNOWN. By invalid data,
I refer to the previous "No such index" snmp type errors. By called
improperly, I mean the type of errors you might get when trying to set
up a new plugin and forget to add all the options ;)