First of all – many thanks to Vitali Voroth and DECOIT GmbH and also Bill McGonigle for providing such great stuff and improving Icinga.
So what it’s all about?
As you might know, we are “monitoring” the Nagios world too and recently on the developer mailing list, an interesting patch popped up:
Currently the Icinga core sets state to CRITICAL if a service check times out. This is the default and can only be changed by recompiling the code. For several reasons you might want to define that yourself – and also, what does CRITICAL mean in this context? If the load on the monitoring box is too high, a service check may generate a timeout, not only a connection loss or similar.
We’ve been asking Bill McGonigle if we can take his patch for Icinga (it’s not applied in current Nagios CVS where it was built against), test it and in case apply it to give it back to the community. It’s a great idea to add the service_check_timeout_state to icinga.cfg and let the user decide upon his demands what state will be set in case of emergency. Bill suggested a new approach for Icinga too – changing the default state from CRITICAL to UNKNOWN. We think this is a great idea and so will it be in upcoming Icinga 1.0.1 :-)
That’s not all, folks …
Vitali Voroth on behalf of DECOIT GmbH sent a rather huge and exclusive improvement for Icinga core: escalation conditions.
Better to describe with an excerpt of the docs:
Using a patch it is now possible to define an escalation_condition (similar to escalation_options [w,u,c,r]). An escalation with a defined condition will only be escalated if the current state of a particular host/service fits the condition. One possible example of use for this could be the following scenario:
Think of two different escalations for the same service foo. One of them should only escalate when service bar is OK, the other should escalate if bar is CRITICAL or WARNING. Now think about foo being the main service offered by a company and the admin has to react immediately if it is down. bar could be a service indicating if the admin is in the office or at home and the escalation would react as following:
* If the admin is in the office, send an email first, after 5 minutes send an SMS
* If the admin is at home, send an SMS first and after 30 minutes a second SMS to the admin and the head of department
A really nice patch and Team Icinga is very happy about this core related enhancement! :-)
And as you will expect – Icinga Core provides the enhancements, while the documentation will be updated too for Icinga 1.0.1 =)
You want more?
If YOU ever wanted your ideas and patches within Nagios/Icinga, do not hesitate to contact us. And even if you want to contribute and develop Icinga, you are very welcome to do so!
Spread the word and show love for Icinga :-)
