Volatile services

Alignak has the ability to distinguish between “normal” services and “volatile” services. The is_volatile property of a service allows you to specify whether a specific service is volatile or not (default behavior).

Volatile services are useful for monitoring:

• Things that automatically reset themselves to an “OK” state each time they are checked
• Events such as security alerts which require attention every time there is a problem (and not only the first time)

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):

• The non-OK service state is logged
• Contacts are notified about the problem and notification intervals are ignored
• The event handler for the service is run

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.

Tip

If you are only interested in logging, consider using stalking feature instead.