Nagios xi - Problems With Scheduled Backups At Midnight

Problem Description

It has been observed that scheduling backups of Nagios xi at midnight (00:00) will create multiple Nagios parent processes to be unintentionally created. Multiple Nagios parent processes causes many unusual problems.

Explanation

At midnight the Nagios process performs it's daily log file rotation. The Nagios process moves the old log file to the archives directory and creates a new nagios.log file. When it creates the new log file it also dumps the current state of every host and service object into the new nagios.log file. In larger deployments of Nagios xi this process may take several minutes.

If you schedule a Nagios xi backup to occur at midnight, the first step in the backup script is to restart the nagios service. The nagios service is restarted to force the retention.dat file to be updated with the latest information, this ensures that the file is up to date in the backup. This creates a problem with the existing Nagios process and the daily log file rotation that is being performed.

Resolving The Problem

Do not schedule Nagios xi backups to run at midnight, instead schedule them for ten minutes past midnight (00:10).

Final Thoughts

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http://support.nagios.com/forum/