Best Practices for Contacts

Nagios Nagios Configuration support
1

I have Nagios 3.03 running on Solaris 10 with pnp4Nagios.
Currently monitoring 128 hosts with 265 Services.
Nagios is working great…

Notifications and Contacts are very new to me since I have only
used Nagios to notify SA’s in the past…

Recently, others in the organization
have found out about it and want me to add them to certain hosts etc…

Overview
3 groups needing notifications
[blockquote]SA - me
Devs -
DBA -[/blockquote]

I want the DEVS and DBA to receive notifications during work hours for specific
services…
I know about timeperiods and those are configured…
I have also created new contacts and contactgroups for them

What would be the most efficient way to do this… ?

thx
tk

2

Hi,

I’d say, the best practice would be to create 3 contact groups (SA, Devs and DBA).
The contact groups Devs and DBA would have the option “notification_period” set to the timeperiod you created (ie: work hours).

For each contact group, you’ll have only one contact, which would be the e-mail address of these contacts.

And then, to finish, for each host/service you want the notification sent to them, you add the contact group:

contact_groups SA, Devs, DBA.

Don’t know if it’s clear enough, but anyway, it should be quite easy
=> nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/ … ml#contact

3

You can also use a nested contact group approach…

define contactgroup{ contactgroup_name everyone alias The world and his dog contactgroup_members SA, Devs, DBA }
and use contact_groups everyone in your appropriate host/service checks.
nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/ … ntactgroup

4

Thx for the replies…

5

OK…
From my reading any settings in a service file
i.e
contact_groups testing

supersede what is listed in templates.cfg
i.e. generic-service

I must be doing something wrong here:

contact.cfg 

define contact{
        contact_name                    ctran
        use                             generic-contact
        alias                           CT
        contact_groups                  test
        service_notification_period     workhours
        host_notification_period        workhours
        service_notification_options    w,u,c,r
        host_notification_options       d,u,r
        email                           address-here
        }

define contactgroup{
        contactgroup_name       test
        alias                   test
        notification_period     workhours
        members                 ctran
        }

Here is the test.cfg that I am doing my testing with

define host{
        use                     local-server   
        host_name               aml000t1
        alias                   aml000t1
        address                 192.168.212.68
        }
define hostgroup{
        hostgroup_name  Host-Email-Test
        alias           Host-Email-Test
        members         aml000t1
        }
define service{
       use                             local-service
       host_name                       aml000t1
       service_description             PING
        contact_groups                  test
        check_command                   check_ping!100.0,20%!500.0,60%

I am not getting any notification to the email address but I am still getting to the
admin account…

So the changes aren’t taking effect (yes I have stopped and restarted Nagios) :frowning:

Ideas ??

6

Hi,

I’m really not sure (I haven’t experimented much with contact-groups, as I really don’t like them :)), but could try to add the “contact_groups test” directive in your host definition ?

not sure it will work better, but it’s worth a try :slight_smile:

ps: thanks for the “So the changes aren’t taking effect (yes I have stopped and restarted Nagios)”; it saves useless questions ^^