Reason for dropping contact_groups from hostgroup

Andreas Ericsson ae at op5.se
Wed Jun 8 12:44:18 CEST 2005


Yann DIRSON wrote:
> Andreas wrote:
> 
>>Make heavy use of templates.
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, unless I miss something, I cannot "use" several other 
> templates when building a host block, whereas I can declare my host as 
> being part of several hostgroups.  And if we could, we would have to 
> define precedence rules between them, which would I think be more 
> complicated than just getting new contact_groups from all hostgroups.
> 
> What I do now is building new templates (ou1-os1-server, ou2-os3-server, 
> ou1-infra, etc.) as the need arise.  But there are several issues:
> - it is repetitive work to create them

man 1 sed, or read an online tutorial for it.
You can also turn on regular expression matching and name your 
hostgroups so that you can use it easily. It will triple the load-time 
of nagios but you will get what you want (with fewer lines of config 
than earlier).

> - there are combinatory scaling issues: number of templates is #os * #ou * 
> #types. For each new ou I have a number of templates, where I would only 
> have to add a single hostgroup.
> - all those -server templates inherit a generic-server template with a 
> given contact_groups, I have to explicitely repeat it and append new 
> groups, since I do not know how to just add contact_groups. Duplicated 
> information is always bad, especially as the configuration gets bigger.
> 

Nagios doesn't normalize its configuration anyway, so a lot of info is 
already duplicated.

> Indeed, I notice that nagios does not complain if I add several "use" 
> clauses in a host block, but I guess the last one takes precedence, since 
> it is what seems to happen with other fields like host_name.

True. You can do
contact_groups *
in the "master" template, and exclude them in the others(contact_groups 
!notwanted). That way it will get complemented rather than overwritten.

> Note that if 
> this is intended behaviour, I guess it should be documented in 
> xodtemplate.html, but I'd be more comfortable with nagios throwing out an 
> error in such cases.
> 

It is intended behaviour (an easter egg, more like it, but it's nifty). 
Feel free to submit a patch for the documentation.

> And while I'm at documentation issues, I'd find it pretty useful to have 
> the main doc index link to xodtemplate, and maybe templaterecursion as 
> well.  Currently the user has to guess through which page going to find a 
> link to this information.  Possibly some other docs would need similar 
> promotion.
> 

Like I said; Feel free to submit a patch to fix the documents. As 
always, coding comes first and documentation later. The other way around 
is only possible when making a new implementation of an already 
standardized interface/protocol/whatever.

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


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