Propper definition of service escalations

[Ralph.Grothe at itdz-berlin.de]

Hello list recipients,

I'm still not getting a service escalation to work as I intend
to.

Presumably a service escalation isn't even the appropiate means
for meeting this requirement.

I simply want normal email notifications at the usual regular
intervals to continue
while additionally, only once, send out a specially formatted
email to our trouble ticket
management system to file a ticket whenever a monitored host
isn't "pingable".

To this end I defined a service group of its own that as sole
member contains the
email account of the TT system as a contact and the command
definition required
to format and send out the mail in accordance with the TT
system's internal parser,
referred to by service_notification_commands directive.

I found the examples given in the Nagios docs' escalation chapter
rather ambiguous,
as they read overlapping notification boundaries (i.e. first_ and
last_) and to my
comprehension even redundant and thus misleading directives.

Because things don't work yet with my setup I have to check with
you experts
whether my conception isn't downright false.

This is my current very basic service escalation definition.


$ cat etc/escalations.cfg 
define serviceescalation {
    host_name                   fiddle
    service_description         icmp-host-alive
    first_notification          3
#    last_notification          3
    notification_interval       0
    contact_groups              service_center
}



As you can see I commented (out) 
(always feel the preposition "out" in this context kind of a
tautology, that's why the parentheses, but I'm no English
speaker)
the last_notification directive because I consider it redundant
since I also assigned naught to the notification_interval.
The docs say that a such set notification_interval translates to,
"only send out one notification".
So what need would then there be for having to define
last_notification?
On the other hand I suspect that an undefined (i.e. left out)
last_notification implicitly would initialize to 0.
which according to the docs implies an infinite upper boundary,
viz. never stop sending out notifications.
This leaves me kind of bemused as it looks like a paradox.
So if I was to define last_notification at all I would set it to
the same value as first_notification
because the first should also be the last notification.
But then it would be redundant altogether due to the zero valued
notification_interval.
And it isn't working either.

How is Nagios treating this all?
Is there an intrinsic precedence?

The more I think about this the more I get lost.

Regards

Ralph







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