Meaningful host names / notes / alias?

Hi

When configuring services its possible to define a service_description to clarify what the specific service-check means / does. Is that possible for hosts aswell so that Nagios webinterface displays a host alias or description instead of the “raw” hostname on the “Service Details” or “Service Problems” pages?

Thing is, we got servers called AAA0023.domain.com, AAB0011.domain.com and so on where a number of services needs to be checked. AAB001 is a very important mail server so if an SMTP service fails it’s very important that the person looking at the nagios webinterface knows how to react and who to contact (we are using notifications but also a status screen in our helpdesk). AAB001 is a very lousy name and says nothing about the host so we would like to make the interface display something like “Main SMTP host”. Is there a way to do this? We’ve defined “Alias” in the host setup but it doesn’t show anywhere.

I’ve tried adding a “note” in hostextinfo but that only shows when you display the host details and we’d like it to be shown in the overview.

We’re running Nagios 2.12

A side note: I’m using /var/log/nagios/status.dat to extract warnings/criticals for selected hosts and show them on our “operational status” webpage for customers but same problem here; I can’t find a way to display a “host description” instead of meaningless hostnames.

— Frank