RFC: Escalations Sets

[Marcus Fleige]

Hi Ethan, hi List,

i'm playing around with the new inheritance features in Nagios 3, and 
i'm pretty amazed about the possibilities they offer. Now, as i'm 
preparing a presentation for the upcoming german nagios workshop about 
configuration management, i'm evaluating the new prospects to build a 
small, easy to handle, template based configuration.

the question coming up when it comes to escalations: Is there a cause 
why Nagios lacks the feature to bind multiple escalations to a set of 
escalations?

When i have a look at my prod config, a huge amount of config lines are 
assigned to the escalations, repeating itself over and over again with 
only very small changes (first_escalation, last_escalation). I'm using 
three up to five step escalations, so for each defined service, i need 
to define another 3 to 5 escalation blocks.

One small example:

These are standard escalations, as i need them for most services.

define serviceescalation { 
 
                                                    		contact_groups 
       <Group1>
		first_notification      1 

                 last_notification       1 
 

                 notification_interval   5 

                 host_name               <Host1>
                 service_description     <Service1> 

         } 
 

 
 

define serviceescalation { 
 
                                                    		contact_groups 
       <Group2>
		first_notification      2 

                 last_notification       2 
 

                 notification_interval   10 

                 host_name               <Host1>
                 service_description     <Service1> 

         } 
 


define serviceescalation { 
 
                                                    		contact_groups 
       <Group2>, <Group3>
		first_notification      3 

                 last_notification       0 
 

                 notification_interval   10 

                 host_name               <Host1>
                 service_description     <Service1> 

         } 
 


Now, as these escalation form a logical unit, it would be nice to be 
able to stick them together. Maybe it would be possible to name them 
(like Hosts or Services) and bind them like Host-/Servicegroups:

define serviceescalation {
		name			standard-step1
		[...]
}
define serviceescalation {
		name			standard-step2
		[...]
}
define serviceescalation {
		name			standard-step2
		[...]
}

define serviceescalationsset {
		name			standard-escalation
		use			standard-step1, standard-step2, standard-step3
		[...]
}

In consequence, it would be rather simple to define escalations for 
example by just combining service and escalationset:

define service {
		host_name		<Host1>
		service_description	<Service1>
		escalationset		standard-escalation
		[...]
}


What do you think about that? Would it be useful for anyone else? How 
much work would it be to build such an enhancement?


Regards,

Marcus Fleige

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