SURVIVOR: process Check Module
About process
basics
Module Type Scheduler Remote
check No Yes
syntax 
     module process {
       [warn <relation>]
       [prob <relation>]
       name <string>
       [name ...]
       [matchtype <flags>]
       [userid <string>]
     }
     via <transport>

Dependencies

  • None

Arguments

Name Type Value
warn optional relation, reg/regv not allowed Generate a warning if the specified relation matches the number of processes found.
prob optional relation, reg/regv not allowed Generate a problem if the specified relation matches the number of processes found.
name required string list The regular expression used to match the process. If more than one is provided, each must match.
matchtype optional flags a,i If not provided, only the name of the program (argv[0]) is examined to compare against the name filter.
  • a indicates to examine the name of the program plus all of the arguments.
  • i indicates the program is run through an interpreter, and so the name of the program begins with the second token.
userid optional string Match only those processes owned by this user. If the userid is specified as a numeric uid rather than a username, this module may run significantly faster on hosts with slow name service backends.

If neither warn nor prob are provided, matching no processes will result in a problem while matching one or more processes will return OK.

Description

The process module determines if zero or more processes are running matching the provided regular expressions, optionally only examining those with the provided userid. For SYSV environments, For SYSV environments, ps -e -o user,uid,pid,time,args is used, for BSD environments, ps -a -o user,uid,pid,time,command is used if it can be determined that such options are supported, otherwise ps -aux is used.

The matchtype argument can be used to adjust how matching occurs. By default, only the name of the program is matched. However, in some cases (a), the full argument string (as obtained via ps) is necessary for comparison. In other cases (i), programs are run through an interpreter (eg: /usr/bin/perl or java), and the program name is actually an argument to the interpreter running it.

Examples

  1. To verify that at least one process matching .*named owned by root is running (the named and namedSerial modules can be used to verify that named is responding): 
         module process {
       userid   root
       name     .*named
     }
     via remote
  2. To verify that between 5 and 25 processes matching .*httpd owned by the www user are running (the protocol module can be used to verify that httpd is responding): 
         module process {
       userid  www
       name    .*httpd
       prob    nb[5,25]
     }
     via remote
  3. To verify both regular and secure web servers are running, generating a warning if less than 25 are found and a problem if none are found: 
         module process {
       userid  www
       name    .*httpd
       name    .*httpsd
       warn    lt[25]
       prob    lt[1]
     }
     via remote
  4. To look for a java process called javaApp: 
         module process {
       name       reg[.*javaApp]
       matchtype  i
     }
     via remote
$Date: 2006/11/19 21:16:27 $
$Revision: 0.12 $
 keywords
matchtype
name
prob
userid
warn