Nagios, check_openmanage and the dreaded out-of-date firmware

I started to add some nagios monitoring for one of our Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers, but was a bit puzzled when I got this response:

nagios# /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_openmanage -s -H mq-citrix-4
WARNING: Controller 0 [PERC 6/i Integrated]: Firmware '6.1.1-0047' is out of date

Hmmm... I'm not sure I want to start dropping production servers to upgrade firmware, just to make the monitoring system happy. Luckily, the check_openmanage script is intelligently written, and offers lots of options to blacklist checks of some items. Cool!

So for us, I can simply do this:

nagios# /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_openmanage -H mq-citrix-4 -b ctrl_fw=0
OK - System: 'PowerEdge 1950 III', SN: 'FW86Y1S', 16 GB ram (4 dimms), 1 logical drives, 2 physical drives

To make this work in the config file for Nagios, I added the highlighted bit to the host definition:

 define host{
        use                     windows-server

        host_name               mq-citrix-4
        _openmanage_options     -b ctrl_fw=0
        }


Now I'm wondering if it's a little bit wrong to hide warnings about out-dated firmware. Oh well...