Hi Nagios-ers ... I need a little help with some logic here. In our network we have the usual set up: web servers -> VIP -> Cache -> VIP but then on top of the cache VIP we also use an external caching provider (no prizes for guessing who that is, akamai) this means all requests for <a href="http://www.mysite.com">www.mysite.com</a> go to this external source via cname, which then gets assigned a round-robin'ed IP. so it changes a lot. now, i want to monitor all kinds of page response times, error codes and such that i know check_http can do ... and i can do that easily as a service definition for my web server host objects, or my vip host object or my squid host objects etc. but ... and here's where i get confused ... i have no host objects for the external caches, so what IP do i do my http_check tests against to ensure that i'm hitting our outermost layer as a user would? put another way ... how would you all go about monitoring a website that isn't yours (say you wanted to monitor <a href="http://cnn.com">cnn.com</a> for all these things, what ip would you run your checks against? can i create a host with a domain name only? i'm sure this is easy and i'm just missing it ... so thanks for your gentle help! :-) august