[Xymon] Can I monitor how many connections are in TIME_WAIT for a specific port

[Buchan Milne]

On Tuesday, 24 January 2012 18:13:41 Root, Paul wrote:
> Hi,
>         We are monitoring a particular port that we are having issues with.
> 8022, it's a proxy port for HP NA.
> 
>         Anyway, I have an expect script that goes in and tests the
> functionality of the port. But when it starts to go bad, this script get
> stuck in TIME_WAIT, along with the users connecting to the port.
> 
>         So, can I look at the port data before I try connecting, and if
> there are a bunch of TIME_WAIT connections, just skip the test entirely?

Why don't you just (in hobbit-clients.cfg or analysis.cfg) use something like 
this

        PORT LOCAL=%([.:]389) STATE=TIME_WAIT MIN=0 MAX=750 COL=yellow
        PORT LOCAL=%([.:]389) STATE=TIME_WAIT TRACK=ldap-wait MIN=0 MAX=1500 
COL=red

(example taken directly from a similar requirement for monitoring highly 
utilised LDAP servers with badly behaving clients - regex could probably be 
improved but works fine for my purposes)


>         I'm running the test from the xymon server, so I was thinking of
> pulling the data out of xymon directly. Would that by xymoncmd?

Why script around it when built-in features can detect and alert on the error 
condition (and provide graphs as well in case you want to correlate the exact 
number of connections in a specific state to other events)?

Regards,
Buchan