How do you handle odd contacts?

[Furnish, Trever G]

I'm in a quandry.  I have my hosts and services and contacts nicely laid out
in a functional way (unix servers, windows servers, routers, switches, dns,
etc) that fits nicely with the job responsibilities of the people who
normally respond to outages - but now I have one remote admin at one site
who would like to receive alerts only when one of her systems is down.

The problem is that in order to send her alerts concerning only her systems
(one unix box, one windows box), I think I would have to remove her hosts
from their logical groups and create additional groups (host and contact)
for just those systems.  That seems like a really bad solution - all I want
is to allow a contact to get alerts regarding a specific device, without
screwing up the logical layout of the rest of the config file.

Am I missing something?  Is there a way to "apply a contact to a host or
service" instead of the other way around?  How do you handle this at your
site?

It seems like the way Nagios handles the connections between contacts and
hosts and services is only partially complete.  Specificly, I can apply a
contact group to a hostgroup or a service, but I can't apply a contact (no
"group") to it.  Nor can I apply a contact or contact group to a single
host.  It's nice that grouping is available, but it's not so nice that
grouping is *required*. :-(

I've been using the template files for several years now but I admit it
still gives me a headache when I think about it - if I'm missing something
I'd love any advice.

I think the situation I have is probably similar to that in lots of
companies with big branch offices.  I have a core operations team at a
central head quarters office, but I also have branch offices that usually
have one or more local admins.  The local admins should only get alerts
related to their devices (in other words, based on geography); the
headquarters operations team should get alerts based on their area of
expertise (unix, windows, routers, etc).

The only way I can see to satisfy my requirements is to put every host into
its own hostgroup, just because I can't apply a single contact to a single
host or service.  What am I missing?

--
Trever



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