Are the Service thresholds recommend by checkmk or by the manufacture when monitoring by SNMP?

[PedroPereira (Pedro)]

Hi,
So I’m monitoring a lot of devices using SNMP.
Some services show in a “red” state but I’m afraid it is a false positive due to the threshold not being configured correctly.
So I wanted to know if the threshold is something that is recommended by the manufacture when doing SNMP or the checkmk itself.

For example: CPU Usage - critical state at 90% ← Is this a device recommendations by the manufactures or by checkmk?

[andreas-doehler (Andreas)]

@PedroPereira

So I wanted to know if the threshold is something that is recommended by the manufacture when doing SNMP or the checkmk itself.

It depends some devices report their limits and the CMK check knows how to read and respect these limits. But most devices report no limits within the SNMP data. In this case it is possible that CMK uses some global limits set the the generic typ of check (temperature/hum and so on). As long as we don’t know from what check the CPU usage comes, i think it is a generic limit from inside CMK.

[elias.voelker (EliasV)]

Hi Pedro,

@andreas-doehler said it pretty well, there is not one single answer. Many thresholds are also based on experience that our customers and partners and we ourselves have made over the years.

In many cases there isn’t even one “true” answer - depending on the use case, the criticality of the monitored host or service, the volatility of the performance metrics you may be OK with a given value, while another customer is already pressing the panic button.

A CPU load of 98% may be fine for a test system, but do you really want that in production? Etc…

But is there any type of devices (a particular vendor, for example) where you have the impression that the default thresholds are particularly off?

Best
Elias