High Load average

Question

I'm working as a new sysadmin. Monitoring system is working well but since few days ago Nagios Monitoring system warns me that there is a Problem. State is critical , load average is high.

This is what nagios send to me constanly:

***** Nagios ***** 

Notification Type: PROBLEM 

Service: Current Load 

Host: localhost 

Address: 127.0.0.1

 State: CRITICAL Date/Time: Tue Nov 17 08:57:15 CET 2015 

Additional Info: 

CRITICAL - load average: 6.25, 8.22, 8.28

Load average is growing constantly.

I'm not good in linux thats why I don't know how to fix this problem.

LA lower than 8 shouldn't be a problem for your server, since it has 4 cores. read this http://serverfault.com/questions/67759/how-to-understand-the-memory-usage-and-load-average-in-linux-server — DukeLion, Nov 17 '15 at 08:36
You really need to tell us what the server does. It could be anything, including normal. — JayMcTee, Nov 17 '15 at 10:03

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:13

If it has started recently and you have not put any additional load on the server (no configuration changes or any new software deployed or you aren't sure), it's worthwhile to investigate your server to see what caused the load increase. For that you need to be able to log into the server and have root access. You can start with tools like top and investigate further. See here for some hints: CPU load too high. How to investigate?.

If you are unable to find anything abnormal and can conclude that, it is normal behavior of the server, then you can configure Nagios plugin's warning and critical valuse accordingly. Here's how: What Warning and Critical values to use for check_load?

High Load average

1 Answers1