Decouple severity from Nagios plugin return codes #9
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This change is backwards-compatible. Nagios plugins for non-trivial services will often poke multiple data points looking for anomalous or undesirable behaviour. Each data point is often reflected with its own check Result in nagiosplugin. If all data points are within tolerance, we can rely on nagiosplugin to return an OK result to its parent process. Similarly, if one or more data points are outside tolerance, we can rely on nagiosplugin to return a non-OK (WARNING or CRITICAL) result to its parent process. This pattern greatly simplifies plugin development: plugins may focus on the monotonous task of data-gathering, leaving the ultimate 'result join' to the nagiosplugin library. Life get complicated when one or more data points are unable to be queried (for whatever reason). Prior to this change, any single UNKNOWN Result would have superseded all other batched check Results: including other WARNING or CRITICAL Results. Amongst organisations that do not treat an individual UNKNOWN result as a pageable event, this behaviour suppressed actual failures (see #8). This commit introduces the notion of a 'status policy': a mapping between a conventional check status and its severity, relative to other statuses. Results are now ordered by severity instead of the fixed numeric constants defined by Nagios. Organisations may now prioritise plugin return codes to match their established monitoring policy. Unit tests in check_test.go demonstrate use. This decoupling is invisible by default. The default status policy mimics old behaviour. To enable alternative severity prioritisation, the caller must invoke the new NewCheckWithOptions() initialiser.
saj
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Apologies for the significant delay, been flat out this month. I will look at this tonight. |
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I think this is a good solution; the additional complexity is unfortunate, but I think the flexibility here more than outweighs it - nice. 👍 Thanks for reworking this change, the effort's appreciated - and I'll try to be quicker with the next one. :) |
olorin
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Jan 14, 2016
Decouple severity from Nagios plugin return codes
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An alternative solution the problem identified in #8.
Compared with #8, this approach should be fully backwards-compatible -- but comes at the cost of additional complexity.