[Nagiosplug-help] load plugin

[Dan Stromberg]

I set up the load plugin for a few of my machines.  Two are suns, one is
linux.  If it works out well, I'd like to get it set up for many more
hosts.

One of the suns is a critical server I look after for a client.  The
plugin has been reporting some astonishingly high load average numbers
for this machine.  We've been trying to convince the client for some
time to upgrade this hardware.  If we can trust these numbers, this
might be the information we need to get the upgrade.

However, another one of the machines I set up with the load plugin, is a
redhat box.  It didn't have rstatd configured, but the load plugin kept
giving fairly high numbers for it too.  Once, nagios gave two
consecutive criticals with identical numbers for the sun and the redhat
box, even though I had neglected to configure rstatd on the redhat box.

How trustworthy is the load plugin?  Is it, or perhaps the nagios
framework, sometimes using uninitialized memory?  Why didn't it give an
error about not being able to contact my rstatd?

TIA.