Escalations periods are messed and thus unintuitional.

[nagios at udmvt.ru]

Hello, nagios-developers.

The problem I want to describe is not a bug, but rather a misconception.
It is all about notification escalations and corresponding intervals.
(Here I do not mention, what that intervals exactly are...)

Ok, there is an escalation definition, which define INTERVALS of
notifications to assign different (than default) properties to that notifications.
Among various properties there is "notification_interval" of type TIME
INTERVAL.
Notification escalation can be "valid" during it's NOTIFICATION interval,
which is defined by the notification numbers (first and last notifications).
When escalation is "valid" it may change "notification_interval" between
notifications, making it larger or smaller, BUT (here goes the
misconception) between which exactly notifications ???
Between those notifications, that are inside escalation? Right?
The problem here is that first notification, that begins escalation, is
inside escalation too, and it is natural to think, that
notification_interval for that notification is too affected,
but that is not what happens in Nagios.
Notification escalation labels some notifications as having different
"contacts" and "notification_interval" values. For single event this is OK
to have "contacts" value, but single notification cannot have "interval",
it has no sense, you should feel it now, reading this sentence.

This strange feature should be corrected or documented,
since it is not clear from documentation, how notification_interval is
computed for notification, that begins the escalation.

I suggest correction of code, since I want to have the method to set a different
value for notification_interval for all the notifications of the escalation.
So the time of the next notification will be computed from the sequence number
of the next notification, but not the current one (like now).

If this is a feature, I insist on documenting it, since it is really
unintuitive to have "contacts" to be changed from the beginning of the
escalation, but "notification_interval" changed only for second notification
from that escalation...

PS: misconception here goes from uncertainty in the definition of
notification_interval. Interval means two points, and it is not defined
(from documentation) where is the current notification among that points.
Is it at the beginning of the interval or at the end? In other words:
notification_interval is time to wait after the current notification [happened],
or is it time to wait before the current notification [will happen] ?
Interval cannot be defined between current and current notifications,
since they are all the same one :), but this is what can be deduced from
current documentation.

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