Cheshire Cat Computing

Hi,
I've been getting "data is stale" error every one hour . Here is the error:

[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'node1' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'node11' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'node13' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'node15' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'node3' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'node37' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'Sensor Collection Monitor' on host 'node37' are stale by 0d 0h 1m 53s (threshold=0d 0h 1m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'node5' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'node9' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:54 2011] Warning: The results of service 'NodeInfo' on host 'nh' are stale by 0d 0h 0m 18s (threshold=0d 0h 3m 15s). I'm forcing an immediate check of the service.
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: node1;NodeInfo;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: node11;NodeInfo;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: node13;NodeInfo;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: node15;NodeInfo;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: node3;NodeInfo;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: node37;NodeInfo;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: node5;NodeInfo;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: node9;NodeInfo;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE ALERT: nh;NodeInfo;WARNING;HARD;3;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE NOTIFICATION: nagios;nh;NodeInfo;WARNING;notify-by-epager;WARNING: data is stale
[Thu Feb 10 14:54:56 2011] SERVICE NOTIFICATION: nagios;nh;NodeInfo;WARNING;notify-by-email;WARNING: data is stale



I would like to get rid of these errors once and for all. I have tried adding parameter 'check freshness' with value 0 in nrpe_template.cfg but it did not help remove these stale errors from coming up.
What can be done to eliminate these stale messages in nagios.log?
Thanks in advance!

The 'data is stale' message means that Nagios is running the Freshness check. This is normal, and not a problem.

Since eventlog entries can come at any time, or not at all, it is easily possible that nothing is sent to Nagios for many hours. If you have freshness checks enabled, then you can make Nagios set the service to 'OK' if no messages are received for (eg) 1 hour. Otherwise, a 'critical' message will set the service to critical and it will never go back to OK unless you manually submit a status via the web interface (which might be what you prefer to do, of course).

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

Hi Steve,
Thanks fro the prompt reply!
These messages are huge in number and really not of much importance to me.
Hence I would surely want these to not appear in the nagios.log. How could I do this?
Also could you please let me know if there's any documentation (excerpt stating that getting these data is stale messages are normal).
Thanks!

You can disable freshness checks. This will stop the messages, but will also stop services from resetting their status after the timeout.

-or-

You could edit the nagios.cfg and set the options to exclude these messages from logging. How to do this and if it is possible depends on your version of Nagios.

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11