I am writing a Nagios plugin to monitor trends of a certain storage resource utilization (e.g. gradual increases are fine, but an instantaneous/sudden increase or decrease in resource usage may indicate a problem). For what it's worth, it is reviewing the last N entries in an RRD file generated by a custom cacti data source/templates.

What is the "right" way to handle Nagios notification config/implementation for this? The problem is that it the plugin would exit as warning/critical for one polling period, but in the next it would be fine (or 3 polling periods later, if I look at 3 polling periods worth of data).

I guess the question is: should I just write it in such a way that it will alert for X polling periods, or should I find a way to write it such that manual intervention is required for it to clear (such as logging into the monitoring server or hitting a URL to run a script that submits a passive result)?

Your input is appreciated, and if you have any tips for how to implement the latter I'm open to them (I can think of a few ways to possibly implement it)