The retention file contains the state of your host and services, so that they are kept when shinken is restarted.
Sometimes you’ll want to inspect (and possibly fix) the retention file, in case you need to work-around a bug or simply better understand what is stored there.
When you use the PickleRetention module in the scheduler (cf. ‘’define scheduler’’ in ‘’shinken-specific.cfg’‘), you can simply manipulate the retention file using Python.
#!/usr/bin/python
import pickle
import sys
sys.path.append('/opt/shinken')
import shinken
r = pickle.load(file('/tmp/retention.dat'))
h = r['hosts']
# Example:
# [(k,v) for (k,v) in h['your_host'].items() if k.find('downtime') >= 0]
#
# del h['your_host']
#
# for k,v in r['services'].items():
# if 'your_host' in k:
# del r['services'][k]