As a template object, it would be very useful to have the capability within a servicedependency definition to be able to express without explicitly listing host_name(s) the following dependency relationship: make service A depend on service B on only self-same host, of hostgroup X It might look something like this: define servicedependency { service_description service B dependent_service_description service A dependent_hostgroup hostgroup X host_name SELF } Currently it appears that the only way to do this is to list explicitly all of the hostnames where this type of service dependency is desired (leaving off the dependent_hostgroup line). Having the SELF keyword (or some equivalent mechanism) would greatly simplify the use of a template object to define this kind of dependency. I have written a perl-script to expand the members of the dependent_hostgroup using the objects.cache file as the source for the hostgroup members to populate this type of servicedependency definition with the relevant host_name(s). It has the obvious deficiency that it depends on an exiting running configuration, and will not include newly-added hosts from a config that's been updated since the last restart. A former collegue has written a nagios patch to do just this for an old release of nagios (2.01a). We have moved to version 3.0, so the patch is no longer useable. I can supply my script and/or the 2.01a patch if there is interest. Paul