Nagios web GUI, contact groups, hosts and services

[L.C. Karssen]

Dear list,

I'm presently working on a Nagios 3.2.0 setup that monitors approximately
1000 hosts and about 5000 services. The setup doesn't make use of Nagios'
notification system, instead people at a control center (NOC) use the
Nagios web interface to alert the appropriate people in case of an alert.

The Nagios configuration is based on a set of host (group) templates,
where services are assigned to host groups. For example: the 'check_swap'
service definition is associated with the host group 'all unix hosts'.

The problem I'm confronted with is that the people at the NOC don't need
to see all services on a given host. For example, they shouldn't call the
sysadmin at night if an SSL certificate check goes into critical state
because the certificate is only valid for ten more days. So we want to
remove that service from their view. In the present situation contact
groups (used to determine which servers are visible to which department)
are added to each specific host, but according to the Nagios docs
(http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/cgiauth.html) a contact group can
see _all_ services on a given host if it is listed as a contract group for
the host.
So I decided to remove the NOC contact group from the individual host
definitions and to assign the NOC contact group only to specific services.

This leads me to another problem. Some service checks (i.e. host groups)
are used in one department only. This works fine.
However, some other service checks (like check_swap for the 'all unix
hosts' hostgroup) are shared by all departments, but some departments
don't want the NOC to see check_swap alerts whereas others do want to pass
these alerts to NOC. It would be possible to make services with slightly
different names (e.g. check_swap_dept1, check_swap_dept2), each with the
correct contact group. However, that seems to be a needless increase of
complexity.
Another approach would be to make host groups for each department and
somehow change the service contact group for each host group.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to get that to work.


Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.


Lennart Karssen.


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