Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

What is the time?

Time offset is the amount of time that is off (or drift) from a specific value. In Linux systems, date is been calculating from the beginning of time. That is 00:00:00 1 January 1970 or as it called Unix Time and systems define date (time) as the number of seconds that have elapsed from 01.01.1970.

It is so important that even a few seconds off can cause tremendous disaster in data centers and applications.

Network Time

To avoid problems with time, systems must and should synchronize their time over the Internet every now and then. This is being done by asking a central NTP server via Network Time Protocol. The most common scenario for infrastructures is to have one or two NTP servers and then all the systems inside this infrastructure can synchronize their time from those machines.

Nagios - NRPE

In my case, I have a centralized NTP Daemon that runs on the Nagios Linux machine. That gives me the opportunity to check the EPOCH time of any system in my infrastructure against the time that the Nagios Server has.

Nagios Check

This is the script I am using:

# ebal, Thu, 11 May 2017 12:08:50 +0000

# EPOCH
TIME=$1
WARN=5
CRIT=10

# seconds
OFFSET=$( echo $(( $(date -d 'now ' +%s) - ${TIME} )) | sed -e 's#-##g' )

if [ "${OFFSET}" -lt "${WARN}" ]; then
        echo "OK"
        exit 0
elif [ "${OFFSET}" -ge "${CRIT}" ]; then
        echo "CRITICAL- ${OFFSET}"
        exit 2
elif [ "${OFFSET}" -lt "${CRIT}" ]; then
        echo "WARNING- ${OFFSET}"
        exit 1
else
        echo "UNKNOWN- ${OFFSET}"
        exit 3
fi

In a nutshell the script gets as the first argument an epoch time and calculate the diff between it’s own epoch time and that.

Example

./check_time_offset $(date -d 'now + 1 min' +%s)

The output is this:

CRITICAL- 60

Nrpe Configuration

This is the configuration for nrpe to run the check_time_offset

# tail -1 /etc/nrpe.d/time_offset.cfg

command[check_time_offset]=/usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_time_offset $ARG1$

Nagios Configuration

and this is my nagios configuration setup to use a remote nrpe :

define service{
        use                             service-critical
        hostgroup_name                  lnxserver01
        service_description             time_offset
        check_command                   check_nrpe!check_time_offset!$TIMET$
        }

Take a minute to observer a little better the nrpe command.

check_nrpe!check_time_offset!$TIMET$

TIMET

I was having problems passing the nagios epoch time as an argument on the definition of the above service.

Testing the nrpe command as below, I was getting the results I was looking for:

./check_nrpe -H lnxserver01 -c check_time_offset -a $(date -d 'now + 6 sec' +%s)

But is there a way to pass as a nagios argument the output of a command ?

• No

A dear colleague of mine mentioned nagios macros:

Standard Macros in Nagios

$TIMET$     Current time stamp in time_t format (seconds since the UNIX epoch)

Perfect !!!