![\"Nagios](\"\/\/chriscarey.com\/projects\/ajax-monitor-for-nagios\/ajax-monitor-1.png\")
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In server monitoring with Nagios, nobody likes to get paged any more than necessary. This article will show you how to prevent multiple “CHECK_NRPE: Socket timeout after 10 seconds<\/strong>” alerts every time a host goes down.<\/p>\n In this circumstance, I’m not trying to get NRPE working. I’m trying to shut it up<\/strong> when there is an outage.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Every time a host goes down due to network issues, Nagios alerts a “host down” alert, which pages my phone. Nagios also sends one “CHECK_NRPE: Socket timeout after 10 seconds” alert for each remote service check on the box (check hard drive space, check processes, check zombies, check apt, check load, etc).<\/p>\n If I’m watching 10 services on a single box, this is a total of 11 pages on my phone<\/strong> when that box is down. When you are monitoring a lot of systems, this can get out of control very fast.<\/p>\n What would be better is when a host goes down, the ping host check on nagios alerts me the host is down, and the multiple other nrpe checks on the box are not alerting. I know the box is down, so I expect that I’m not going to be able to do those other checks.<\/p>\n The solution<\/strong><\/p>\n In generic-service.cfg<\/strong> where we configure our service templates, create a new service template (copying generic-service if you want). Call it nrpe-service.<\/p>\n In the new nrpe-service template notification_options<\/strong>, remove the u to prevent notifying on “UNKNOWN”<\/p>\n On each of your services that use nrpe, change them to “use nrpe-service”:<\/p>\n Then we need to modify the call to check_nrpe and add a -u option. This is from the check_nrpe help page: On my box this is found in \/etc\/nagios-plugins\/config\/check_nrpe.cfg<\/strong>:<\/p>\n So we have told Nagios that for these types of services, we do not want to alert on UNKNOWN states. Then we told check_nrpe to make socket timeouts return an UNKNOWN state instead of CRITICAL.<\/p>\nnotification_options w,c,r<\/div><\/div>\ndefine service {
\n host_name ipv4.securespot.net
\n check_command check_nrpe_1arg!check_disk
\n use nrpe-service
\n service_description Check Disk
\n}<\/div><\/div>\n
\n-u = Make socket timeouts return an UNKNOWN state instead of CRITICAL<\/p>\ndefine command {
\n command_name check_nrpe
\n command_line \/usr\/lib\/nagios\/plugins\/check_nrpe -u -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c $ARG1$ -a $ARG2$
\n}<\/div><\/div>\n