Oncall rotation configuration

I’m considering installing and testing nagios to monitor our network. I was curious about one thing. Can I have 2 people on call at the same time with one person responsible for one type of devices and the other person responsible for the other devices and each receive the proper notifications?

Absolutely… The contacts configuration allows for not only that type of configuration, but escalation as well if one sleeps through the alert

Here’s a part that I am trying to understand, and evidently failing miserably…

I’m looking to have nagios kick off a command on first failure (service/host, doesn’t matter). If there is a repeat, I don’t want it to continue re-issuing said failed command, but notify a contact.

I understand escalation can have a contact group notified at a given interval, but how can I have a command run once and only once?

e.g. let’s say http goes down for some reason. I want nagios to kick off an attempt to start it back up (or, more accurately, to tell the server that had the failure to kick off said attempt).
If that attempt fails (as indicated by a second, or fifth, or twelfth, or whateverth alert), rather than continuing to try to restart httpd, I want it to whine to me, so that I know that not only did it die, but also that it could not be restarted and there is something I need ot check out).

I know I can define a command, and I know I can, under a given service, tell nagios what command to run to notify me, but, how can I specify a different command, once the problem is being escalated?

Thanks!

You need to use an event handler:

nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/ … dlers.html

Your situation is actually outlined in the docs fairly well with some sample code.