[Nagiosplug-devel] New threshold syntax - changes

[Richard Edward Horner]

OK, well, reading that page, I think it's an improvement over the
current spec but I want to stress that ranges are not conceptually
appropriate for a lot of situations and I doubt end users will want to
think of their check_users call as either the OK range being 0 to 10
or the critical range being 11 to infinity. I think making the end of
the range like you mentioned helps with this but you're still left
with the problem of you can't do:

check_users --critical=10

and

check_disk --critical=10

and have them both behave as expected. One of them will require some
"range" specific syntax when all I want to do is specify a level (and
it's obvious which way it should go) and not a range. Even if the
program itself is going to internally convert it into a range to do
it's check, how the thing is programmed shouldn't dictate how the user
has to interact with it.

Thanks, Rich(ard)

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Thomas Guyot-Sionnest <dermoth at aei.ca> wrote:
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> Richard Edward Horner wrote:
>> I don't have any real concerns with 1, 2 or 4.
>>
>> I think 3 is an important clarification.
>>
>> One thing that has bugged me with thresholds is that the spec is only
>> useful if it's followed but most plugins don't follow it and just
>> implement what's quick. I'll give the pertinent example.
>
> Not all plugins use the thresholds library. If the --help output doesn't
> say something like "--warning=THRESHOLD" with a comment in the notes
> pointing to the developer guidelines section explaining ranges, it's
> most likely not "real" thresholds. We have modified a few plugins to the
> real thresholds library in the last years but now the goal would be
> writing a new enhanced one and porting all plugins to it.
>
>
> Any plugin using this specification will have to go trough the library
> (it can't really be done otherwise, as it would require lot of code
> which should be already written!). The libnagiosplug project will also
> make this code usable easily by 3rd party plugins (and this will also be
> implemented in the Nagios::Plugin Perl module, obvisously...
>
>> I think if you're going to have a spec, it needs to be followed. If
>> you have a spec and it's not followed, it's confusing and worse than a
>> waste of time as it is probably costing ppl time.
>
> I should've sent it with the previous email. The new spec is here:
> http://nagiosplugins.org/rfc/new_threshold_syntax
>
> - --
> Thomas
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-- 
Richard Edward Horner
Engineer / Composer / Electric Guitar Virtuoso
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