"combining" notification emails?

Ethan Galstad nagios at nagios.org
Mon Oct 9 06:31:54 CEST 2006


Rob Brown wrote:
> Currently, as I understand it: the notification logic works roughly as
> follows: (i know i'm leaving out a lot)
> 1) service/host goes down.
> 2) Determine whether or not to send notification
> 2) If so, iterate through contact group(s) listed for that
> host/service and run notification command for each user.
> In this case, a seperate email is sent to each user who is in the contact group.
> I would love to see a configuration option in Nagios that would allow
> ONE message to be sent for each notification with ALL of the contacts
> listed in the To: header. This would allow contacts to "see" who else
> was notified about this problem and use the "reply to all" feature to
> generate discussion threads.
> If it would be possible to "flip" the logic this way via a
> configuration option, that would rock.
> aggregate_notifications=0/1
> 0 = default method: seperate message to each contact
> 1 = aggregate method: one message to all contacts
> Currently the notification command is assigned to each contact: I
> assume this would need to move to the contact group definition.
> I would interested to hear others' opinions on the topic.
> Perhaps there is another way to accomplish this that I cannot think of
> or there is a good reason why not to do it.
> 

This might be a bit tougher to accomplish than would first appear.  The 
reason is that notifications don't necessarily have to be via email - 
they are performed by external commands which can do arbitrary things. 
Nagios could be designed to understand combining multiple messages into 
one using multiple To: addresses, but email is just one of many possible 
notification methods (albeit a common one).

Another option would be to have Nagios send notifications to an external 
app, which is responsible for grouping notifications together as you 
mentioned.  Sounds like a good addon project if you ask me. :-)


Ethan Galstad,
Nagios Developer
---
Email: nagios at nagios.org
Website: http://www.nagios.org

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