Email flood from nagios

Nagios
1

I have a major problem with the email notification from Nagios. To day I got over 1000 emails on my cell phone at 10 cents each from a 12 hour outage. Here is an example of my service configuration and as you can see I should not be getting more then one message every 240 min (yes the base time is still set to 60 seconds per unit). Any ideas?

define service{
use generic-service ; Name of service template to use

    host_name                       Summit-A
    service_description             PING
    is_volatile                     0
    check_period                    24x7
    max_check_attempts              3
    normal_check_interval           5
    retry_check_interval            1
    contact_groups                  router-admins
    notification_interval           240
    notification_period             24x7
    notification_options            c,r
    check_command                   check_ping!100.0,20%!500.0,60%
    }
2

if you are not using escalations you could think about using
notification_interval 0
at least as a test to check if it gets sent only once this way.

Luca

3

You left out a big piece of the puzzle. What do you have your “host_notification_options” and “host_notification_options” set to in your contacts.cfg file? If you have a “u” in there, then why? Unreachable devices are not of any interest, since nagios can’t reach them due to a device that is in the “d” down state.
Plus, if you have not defined “parents” in your hosts.cfg file, then all devices would report “d” down, and send a notification. To prevent that, define parents, then the devices downstream from a failure, will report “u” unreachable. Of course, you then need to make sure you have contacts.cfg defined to NOT send notifications on “u” type junk.