simulate nagios notifications

Question

My normal method of testing the notification and escalation chain is to simulate a failure by causing one, for example blocking a port.

But this is thoroughly unsatisfying. I don't want down time recorded in nagios where there was none. I also don't want to wait.

Does anyone know a way to test a notification chain without causing the outage? For example something like this:

$ ./check_notifications_chain <service|host> <time down>
at <x> minutes notification email sent to group <people>
at <2x> minutes notification email sent to group <people>
at <3x> minutes escalated to group <management>
at <200x> rm -rf; shutdown -h now executed.

Extending this paradigm I might make the notification chain a nagios check in itself, but I'll stop here before my brain explodes.

Anyone?

Answer 1

If you only want to verify that the email alerts are working properly, you could create a simple test service, which generates a warning once a day.

test_alert.sh:

#!/bin/bash

date=`date -u +%H%M`

echo $date
echo "Nagios test script. Intentionally generates a warning daily."

if [[ "$date" -ge "1900" && "$date" -le "1920" ]] ; then
  exit 1
else
  exit 0
fi

commands.cfg:

define command{
  command_name  test_alert
  command_line  /bin/bash /usr/local/scripts/test_alert.sh
}

services.cfg:

define service {
  host                  localhost
  service_description   Test Alert
  check_command         test_alert
  use                   generic-service
}