Nagios - obsessing over this service: what does this mean?

Question

We use Nagios to monitor our servers. I haven't set this up myself, and I want to change some settings. Most services have the setting obsessing enabled. I wonder what this means, and what happens if I disable it.

Answer 1

The Nagios docs explain this setting as:

This directive determines whether or not checks for the service will be "obsessed" over using the ocsp_command.

The ocsp_command is explained here. This is the "Obsessive Compulsive Service Processor Command."

This option allows you to specify a command to be run after every service check, which can be useful in distributed monitoring.

This command is only executed if the obsess_over_services option is enabled globally and if the obsess_over_service directive in the service definition is enabled.

Red Hat says the option should be disabled unless you are doing distributed monitoring.

So if obsess_over_services is enabled globally, you should check your ocsp_command. Disabling the obsess_over_service option for a service means that the ocsp_command will not run each time that service is checked.