[Nagiosplug-devel] Suggestion about SNMP errors

[Andreas Ericsson]

John Vincent wrote:
> 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 ;)

"No such index" might mean that a particular device was offline or
malfunctioning when the server hosting them was brought up though,
as some of that stuff is added ad-hoc at boot-time.

In short, it varies from case to case. In general, I agree with
you but no case is provably correct.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231