Notification grouping/batching / notification digests

Is there a way to batch up notifications and send out a single email every 5 minutes instead of sending a email out immediately after a state change? i.e. something like:

14:30 (3) Crit
Host foohost1.nyc Ping CRIT
Host foohost2.nyc Ping CRIT
Host foohostn.nyc Ping CRIT

I realize there’s a way to structure things so that if X goes down, then assume everything else is unreachable, but this isn’t what I want to do. When something catastrophic happens to a site I’d rather get one email instead of 1500. The homegrown monitoring solution at my old job did this and it worked quite well.

You can set the number of retries before sending notification for host/service state changes (max_check_attempts option). There is also an option which allows you to send notification evry X minutes (notification_interval). Those can be specified in every host/service definition.

If you wish to be informed onla about the highest host/service in hierarchy which got down/critical state then you should do it with parent/child relationships in host definitions, and with host/service dependencies:
nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/ … dependency