Hello,
When a host goes down, all its services go to the UNKNOWN state to prevent unnecessary checks and notification spam. I believe this behavior is caused by the engine setting “Disable Service Checks When Host Down” being enabled.
While this setting addresses one issue, in my case it creates another.
I have many services that do not need to be checked frequently. Some are being checked once a day, while others are passive services that may not receive updates for weeks.
All these services go to the UNKNOWN state when their host go down and remain in that state even after the host comes back up.
They will stay UNKNOWN until the next scheduled check or passive update is received which, as mentioned, could take weeks.
To work around this, I have to manually force check all affected services, sometimes involving thousands of services at once. Since the GUI limits bulk forced checks to 100 services at a time, I ended up writing an API script to handle this…
This behavior does not occur when the aforementioned setting is disabled. In that case, the retry interval check takes care of refreshing the state of active services, while passive services remain in the OK state.
Is there a setting or another way to automatically force checks of all services associated with a host that comes back up ?
Ideally, I would like to retain the benefits of disabling service checks while a host is down, without having to manually refresh the state of all its services once the host recovers.
I’m currently running version 25.10.18