Updated checkstate to support healthcheck disabling via file

[Skypex]

Dear maintainers,

in usual environments that run the checkstate.sh (like Kubernetes) containers are immutable. That means that you cannot simply inject an env variable into the container without restarting the actual container.

However, due to the nature of Splunk it might be needed to perform some maintenance tasks that require a splunkd stop. This means you need to restart the container first to add the env variable,do your thing and afterwards you need to restart the container again to remove the env variable. So in this case the healthcheck actually decreases availability.

Therefore I would kindly request to add a file check as well. That way you can disable the healthcheck in a running container temporary by creating the file and with out any additional container restarts. Indeed the env variable method is also an option - nothing changes there.

Pleas consider merging or let me know if you need any additional changes!

[adityapinglesf]

@dp-42 @Skypex follow up -

• how can we validate if the new values can be picked up by splunk?
• can you add some more info about how it helps a specific scenario that can be tested to understand the value of these changes

[Skypex]

Hi @adityapinglesf,

what new values? There are no new values, I simply added a check for a specific file. That way you can disable the health check by creating the file.

Some scenarios I could think of:

• We had some occasions that required us to do a splunk fsck repair and many of those operations require splunkd not run
• When upgrading ITSI the docs also state to stop Splunk - ITSI Docs
• I am pretty sure that there are more administrative/maintenance tasks that could benefit from this

Hope that answers your questions and helps evaluating this PR.

[marcispauls]

yep, could be great feature. currently to debug things if shit hits the fan its close to impossible to debug, try to fix, collect diag. i'm not sure about those && and also update in docs might be useful also maybe some tests