Reason for dropping contact_groups from hostgroup ?

[Andreas Ericsson]

Yann DIRSON wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am using 2.0b3, and I'm hit, like others before me, by the removal of 
> "contact_groups" from the hostgroup directive.  Note that 
> docs/notifications.html in 2.0b3 still mentions this feature.
> 
> The changelog mentions that this feature was removed to make things 
> consistent with service notifications, but does not explain why this 
> feature was considered useless.
> 
> My problem is, I have many hostgroups, used to activate specific checks, 
> most notably per-organisational-unit hostgroups (not all services are 
> deployed in all OUs), but also per-OS, per-type (server, network 
> equipment, etc.).  The contacts for those machines are not the same, 
> depending on the hostgroup.  Specifying a contact_group for the hostgroup 
> seems the obvious way to declare this.
> 
> If I want to declare such a setup using only host definitions, I can't see 
> how to avoid declaring host templates for each combination of 
> ou/os/type/whatever: this clearly does not scale.
> 
> Is there a clean way to get the equivalent functionality, or should this 
> feature simply reintroduced in 2.0 ?
> 

Make heavy use of templates. That's what makes nagios scale in the first 
place, and consolidating the scaling part to one area makes it easier 
for first-time users. It's also cleaner code-wise, because things can be 
generalized and doesn't have to have so many exceptions (coders hate 
exceptions).

> 
> Another related issue, for which I did not find a solution, is how to send 
> service notifications to contacts defined on a per-host basis (the admins 
> for the machines, presumably located in the same part of the building, or 
> in direct contact to the users).  Maybe this could be done by adding a new 
> notify_host_contacts flag to services (and servicegroups), that would 
> cause service notifications to be sent to host contacts, and possibly a 
> per-host services_contact_groups, if there is a need for those contacts to 
> be different from the host contacts (although I have no use for the latter 
> myself at the moment).
> 

I've thought about implementing this myself for quite some time, 
although I had the idea that contacts should be inherited from the host 
if none were set in either the service-template or in the service object 
definition itself. Your way is cleaner, since you provide a way to both 
inherit and name contactgroups explicitly.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer


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