Newbie group question - confused

Nagios
1

Hi,

I’ve just installed Nagios 2.0b2 and have read through most of the documentation and sample configs, but there’s still a few things that I’m not clear about and hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

Within the default Nagios.cfg, there’s the entry of
cfg_file=/usr/local/nagios/etc/hostgroups.cfg

Then I placed an entry of
cfg_dir=/usr/local/nagios/etc/servers

Does that mean once I create the individual host.cfg files in the cfg_dir folder I also need to add the individual hostgroups.cfg in that same folder location ?
Or
Do I need individual cfg_file entries for the hostgroups.cfg within Nagios.cfg ?
Or
Do I create a cfg_dir=/usr/local/nagios/etc/servergroup folder and create the individaul groups here, if so how does it know about the host.cfg files that’s within another folder location ???

Any advice is much appreciated.
Thank you.

2

Okay, do yourself a favor: work only with the defaults as you’re a Nagios newbie. You’ll save yourself many a headache in doing so. You don’t need to create separate .cfg files for each host. You can put them all in hosts.cfg. Same goes for your other config files. All of your services can be placed in one file, and all your hostgroups can be placed in another.

All you have to do is make sure that there are cfg_file entries in Nagios.cfg pointing to every file you intend to use in your config. It doesn’t really matter where you put these files (though as I mentioned, default would be best), as long as Nagios knows where to find them.