Added in threshold range format and updated autoconf to 2.54 for a problem

on Darwin)

git-svn-id: https://nagiosplug.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nagiosplug/nagiosplug/trunk@732 f882894a-f735-0410-b71e-b25c423dba1c

diff --git a/doc/developer-guidelines.sgml b/doc/developer-guidelines.sgml
index 6e356159145d5156ce12e8d2d3c09af9a9d52af3..f5e376a11673a8b7c7aaa63f3211664a7acaa19f 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/developer-guidelines.sgml
+++ b/doc/developer-guidelines.sgml
@@ -99,7 +99,7 @@
        <literallayout>
        gnu make 3.79
        automake 1.6
-       autoconf 2.52
+       autoconf 2.54
        gettext 0.11.5
        </literallayout>
 
@@ -235,6 +235,42 @@
       
                </section>
 
+               <section id="thresholdformat"><title>Threshold range format</title>
+               <para>Thresholds ranges define the warning and critical levels for plugins to 
+               alert on. The theory is that the plugin will do some sort of check which returns
+               back a numerical value, or metric, which is then compared to the warning and 
+               critical thresholds.
+               This is the generalised format for threshold ranges:</para>
+
+               <literallayout>
+               [@]start:end
+               </literallayout>
+       
+               <para>Notes:</para>
+               <orderedlist>
+               <listitem><para>start < end</para>
+                       </listitem>
+               <listitem><para>start and ":" is not required if start=0</para>
+                       </listitem>
+               <listitem><para>if range is of format "start:" and end is not specified, 
+                       assume end is infinity</para>
+                       </listitem>
+               <listitem><para>to specify negative infinity, use "~"</para>
+                       </listitem>
+               <listitem><para>alert is raised if metric is outside start and end range
+                       (inclusive of endpoints)</para>
+                       </listitem>
+               <listitem><para>if range starts with "@", then alert if inside this range
+                       (inclusive of endpoints)</para>
+                       </listitem>
+               </orderedlist>
+               
+               <para>Note: Not all plugins are coded to expect ranges in this format. It is
+               planned for a future release to
+               provide standard libraries to parse and compare metrics against ranges. There
+               will also be some work in providing multiple metrics.</para>
+               </section>
+
                <section><title>Performance data</title>
                <para>Performance data is defined by Nagios as "everything after the | of the plugin output" -
                please refer to Nagios documentation for information on capturing this data to logfiles.
@@ -267,9 +303,12 @@
                        </listitem>
                <listitem><para>min and max are not required if UOM=%</para>
                        </listitem>
-               <listitem><para>value, crit, warn, max and min in class [-0-9.]. Must all be the
+               <listitem><para>value, min and max in class [-0-9.]. Must all be the
                        same UOM</para>
                        </listitem>
+               <listitem><para>warn and crit are in the range format (see 
+                       <xref linkend="thresholdformat">)</para>
+                       </listitem>
                <listitem><para>UOM (unit of measurement) is one of:</para>
                        <orderedlist>
                        <listitem><para>no unit specified - assume a number (int or float)