Host Group Notifications - Possible display su ppression?

[Carroll, Jim P [Contractor]]

See comments below.

Nolan Martin wrote:
> I am at a loss on how to best configure Nagios to handle my 
> environment
> needs and would appreciate input and suggestions.
> 
> In my environment, my department oversees the overall health of the
> entire network and its devices.  There are also individual departments
> with their own administrators that provide dedicated support for their
> devices.  

Sounds like there's already a precedent for a definition of other
hostgroups, ie, the hosts which a given group of administrators have
ownership of.

> I have set up host groups that reflect the major groupings of devices,
> such as NetWare servers, NT Servers, Routers, etc.  In turn, I have
> assigned appropriate contacts for my department for each of those host
> groups. 

Sounds good so far, so long as there isn't any unnecessary redundancy, and
also no unwanted gaps.

> The problem I have is how to handle notifications for devices that
> belong to another department.  I only want the department admins to
> receive specific notifications for their devices.  As such, I 
> can't just
> simply add them as a contact groups for the overall host group of
> NetWare servers (for example).  I understand I can create additional
> host groups and assign the hosts to more than one group.  

Sounds like the perfect solution.

> But...  if I go that route, I will then have a whole range of host
> groups displayed on each console.  I am happy with my major groupings
> and don't want to clutter the console with individual department
> groupings as well.

I'm not sure what you mean by "displayed on each console", or "clutter" for
that matter.  If by "console" you mean the workstation of an admin, then I'm
following you.  Personally, I always leave my browser parked on the Tactical
Overview screen, which is quite uncluttered.  If, OTOH, you're referring to
one of the various other screens which effectively give you an inventory
listing of your hosts and services, then yeah, it can get a little busy.

> Is there a way to suppress the display of a host group within each of
> the web console screens?

Not unless you're up for some re-coding of status.cgi.

> If not, can anyone suggest another way to handle this within the
> current boundaries of Nagios?

What exactly are you trying to solve?  To keep the fewest number of
hostgroups?  To avoid hostgroup overlap?  To respond to a PHB request of
"This screen looks too cluttered.  Clean it up, it looks messy"?  From the
outset, it sounded like your concern was primarily to do with notification.
Defining new hostgroups would address that.  But you're concerned with a
cluttered screen.  Removing hosts/services from Nagios would address that
(but would probably defeat the purpose of having Nagios to begin with).

Of course, you could create new contactgroups and apply them individually to
the hosts in question, thus keeping your hostgroup count to a minimum.  But
if a department decides to, say, take a switch down (and thus impacting all
the hosts connected to that switch) and assuming the parent directive wasn't
implemented, the appropriate admin could schedule the entire hostgroup for
maintenance downtime.  Saves lots of clicks and keystrokes (vs. scheduling
each host individually).

I trust that wherever the concern is coming from, that the party involved
understands that the clutter will only grow, in all likelihood.  This
conclusion is based on the fact that just about every network out there will
get hosts added to them, and just about every host out there will need to
have at least one (and probably more) services added to them.  The PHB
should stay focused on the Tactical Overview; green is good, red is bad.

If you're looking to carve things up into tiny snapshots of the bigger
picture, you could always implement other Nagios servers and let them run
with a subset, based on the hosts/services a given group needs to monitor.
Of course, more administrative overhead.

If you're looking for a screen which is a quick list of hostgroups (without
all the host/service detail), then yes, that might be something nice to see.
But I wouldn't remove any of the existing menu options on the left side;
that particular feature might best be listed as a separate item.  Click,
list hostgroups.  Click, drill down into hostgroup.  Etc.  Just understand
that organizing many things into tiny little compartments and adding extra
levels of indirection may eventually lead to a feature that very few people
will use.  I know I don't want to click too many times to get to where I'm
going, but maybe that's just me.

Just my $0.02.

jc

> Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Nolan
> 
> 
> 
> 
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