I have a datacenter that I’m working on getting monitored by Nagios. I have a like of around 300 UPS devices that need to be monitored. Is there an easy way to monitor all of them instead of putting individual entries in a hostgroup definition?
at least once you will have to dfine them all… so you will need at least a host definition, and a hostgroup which will be inserted in the service definitons…
if you have 300 and you have a the address lists you could possibly script quite easily the generation of host definitions 
Is there any way I can put a variable in the host definition host_name directive that will work for all the entries in an external list?
not that i know… which doesn’t mean it’s impossible…
I think I may have found a clever work around for this. I don’t want to risk making Nagios FUBAR by trying to put a loop into the code. So I’ve decided to opt for the copy and paste route. I have a csv file of about 300 UPS devices. So I’m going to use PHP to take the file, and auto place the names of the UPS devices into a preset convention, then print it out to the screen. Then I can just copy and paste If anyone knows of an easier method, PLEASE let me know.
open office calc and excel all have some text formatting functions…
concatenate the standard part of the service description with the cell containing the name of the ups and it’s ip address and you don’t need PHP