Volatile Services


Introduction

Nagios has the ability to distinguish between "normal" services and "volatile" services. The is_volatile option in each service definition allows you to specify whether a specific service is volatile or not. For most people, the majority of all monitored services will be non-volatile (i.e. "normal"). However, volatile services can be very useful when used properly...

What Are They Useful For?

Volatile services are useful for monitoring...

What's So Special About Volatile Services?

Volatile services differ from "normal" services in three important ways. Each time they are checked when they are in a hard non-OK state, and the check returns a non-OK state (i.e. no state change has occurred)...

These events normally only occur for services when they are in a non-OK state and a hard state change has just occurred. In other words, they only happen the first time that a service goes into a non-OK state. If future checks of the service result in the same non-OK state, no hard state change occurs and none of the events mentioned take place again.

The Power Of Two

If you combine the features of volatile services and passive service checks, you can do some very useful things. Examples of this include handling SNMP traps, security alerts, etc.

How about an example... Let's say you're running Psionic Software's PortSentry product (which is free, by the way) to detect port scans on your machine and automatically firewall potential intruders. If you want to let Nagios know about port scans, you could do the following..

In Nagios:

In PortSentry:

Create a shell script in the /usr/local/nagios/libexec/eventhandlers directory named submit_check_result. The contents of the shell script should be something similiar to the following...

	#!/bin/sh
 
	# Write a command to the Nagios command file to cause
	# it to process a service check result
 
	echocmd="/bin/echo"
 
	CommandFile="/usr/local/nagios/var/rw/nagios.cmd"
 
	# get the current date/time in seconds since UNIX epoch
	datetime=`date +%s`
 
	# create the command line to add to the command file
	cmdline="[$datetime] PROCESS_SERVICE_CHECK_RESULT;$1;$2;$3;$4"
 
	# append the command to the end of the command file
	`$echocmd $cmdline >> $CommandFile`

Note that if you are running PortSentry as root, you will have to make additions to the script to reset file ownership and permissions so that Nagios and the CGIs can read/modify the command file. Details on permissions/ownership of the command file can be found here.

So what happens when PortSentry detects a port scan on the machine?