Create hidden hostgroups, many machines in a group, a few of them slightly different

[Christian Anton]

Hello everybody.

I am maintaining and redesigning a quite large Nagios installation in a
mixed environment. The boxes we are monitoring are firewalls, servers,
proxies, loadbalancers, ... a lot of stuff.

As we have different groups of admins which administer different systems
we had host groups like for example "Frontent-Proxies",
"Application-Firewalls" and so on and the mapping to the responsible
users so that a antivirus administrator does not have to see a broken
firewall module.

The problem is using these groups also for managing the service-to-host
mapping in an easy manner. So for example we have 20 firewalls in
"Application-Firewalls", they are the same machines, BUT 8 of them must
use a different SNMP port or another additional service checks or need
different warning/critical thresholds because of higher load. Managing
this in a per-host-manner in services config file is hard work.

My idea was to make something like "organinizational" and "functional"
subgroups of them, so for example:

Application-Firewalls
|
+--Application-Firewalls_special1
|  |
|  +-- host1
|  +-- host2
|  +-- ...
|
+--Application-Firewalls_special2
   |
   +-- host3
   |
   +-- host4

The problem is that all users which are able to view all the hosts
included in all the subgroups of "Application-Firewalls" see _all_ the
subgroups in host overview. Even more difficult is the following szenario:

Firewalls (for overview fw-admins)
|
+--checkpoint1
+--checkpoint2
+--about 20 more machines

Firewalls_with_multicast_routing
|
+--checkpoint1
+--other machines

Now the machines appear twice in the host overview.

I am sure that administrators of larger installations have already
thought about this and maybe you have a few good ideas for me?

How do you manage a lot of machines with slightly different checking to
group them in the same hostgroups anyways?


I hope you understood what i wanted to say ;-)

Best regards

Christian

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