Defining a service dependency for a hostgroup?

[Melvin, Lee]

I'm seeing an annoying paging behavior with our Nagios implementation. 
 We have a number of Windows boxes being monitored -- each box has 
several (4-10) services being monitored on it.  Most of the service 
checks are made through NSClient.

The annoying behavior is, if NSClient crashes, Nagios detects all the 
services on the box as failing, and sends out a notification for each 
service.  All our notifications go to a site hotpager, so one person 
gets 8 pages in a row when the system fails, and then another 8 when 
NSClient is restored.

I've created a checkcommand to watch NSClient itself (basically I just 
test on the CLIENTVERSION variable), and I'd like to make each of the 
other NSClient-based service checks on the system dependent on this 
NSClient check.

The problem I'm running into, and the thing I want help with, is that it 
doesn't appear possible to define a service dependency for a host group, 
only for individual hosts.  I'd rather not have to add (# of Windows 
servers) * (avg. # of service checks per server) service dependency 
entries to my configuration.

Is there any way I can define a configuration entry along the lines of 
(not remotely real config code)

servicedependency {
    hostgroup_name      win_servers
    service             check_nsclient
    dependent_service   check_win_diskfree_c
}

so that all my Windows hosts know that the win_diskfree_c check is 
dependent on check_nsclient on the same host?  This would allow me to do 
what I want with only one service dependency entry for each NSClient 
based service check, which is manageable.

Alternately, is there some other way to achieve this effect?  I'm 
anticipating similar issues on the UNIX side if a NRPE client craps out...

Thanks!

    - Lee


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