Passive Host State Translation

Introduction

When Centreon Engine receives passive host checks from remote sources (i.e other Centreon Engine instances in distributed or failover setups), the host state reported by the remote source may not accurately reflect the state of the host from Centreon Engine’ view. As distributed and failover monitoring installations are fairly common, it is important to provide a mechanism for ensuring accurate host states between different instances of Centreon Engine.

Different World Views

The image below shows a simplified view of a failover monitoring setup.

  • Centreon Engine-A is the primary monitoring server, and is actively monitoring all switches and routers.

  • Centreon Engine-B and Centreon Engine-C are backup monitoring servers, and are receiving passive check results from Centreon Engine-A

  • Both Router-C and Router-D have suffered failures and are offline.

../../../_images/passivehosttranslation.png

What states are Router-C and Router-D currently in? The answer depends on which Centreon Engine instance you ask.

  • Centreon Engine-A sees Router-D as DOWN and Router-C as UNREACHABLE

  • Centreon Engine-B should see Router-C as DOWN and Router-D as UNREACHABLE

  • Centreon Engine-C should see both routers as being DOWN.

Each Centreon Engine instance has a different view of the network. The backup monitoring servers should not blindly accept passive host states from the primary monitoring server, or they will have incorrect information on the current state of the network.

Without translating passive host check results from the primary monitoring server (Centreon Engine-A), Centreon Engine-C would see Router-D as UNREACHABLE, when it is really DOWN based on its viewpoint. Similarly, the DOWN/UNREACHABLE states (from the viewpoint of Centreon Engine-A) for Router-C and Router-D should be flipped from the viewpoint of Centreon Engine-B.

Note

There may be some situations where you do not want Centreon Engine to translate DOWN/UNREACHABLE states from remote sources to their “correct” state from the viewpoint of the local Centreon Engine instance. For example, in distributed monitoring environments you may want the central Centreon Engine instance to know how distributed instances see their respective portions of the network.

Enabling State Translation

By default, Centreon Engine will not automatically translate DOWN/UNREACHABLE states from passive check results. You will need to enable this feature if you need and want it.

The automatic translation of passive host check states is controlled by the translate_passive_host_checks variable. Enable it and Centreon Engine will automatically translate DOWN and UNREACHABLE states from remote sources to their correct state for the local instance of Centreon Engine.