notification_options requirement

[Ethan Galstad]

I think it would make most sense to mark this directive as being 
optional.  If it isn't specified, Nagios should assume that 
notifications should be sent out for all states.  I'll update the code 
and docs and post a patch to CVS shortly.

Rob Brown wrote:
> Hi all,
> I posted this over in the nagios-users list and only got one response
> from someone with the same issue. I figured you all are probably the
> ones to bounce it off of to see if there is a possible fix.
> Basically, according to the docs, notification_options is a required
> directive in a service definition, but does not generate an error if
> omitted. Seems like it should. Makes it hard to troubleshoot if that
> directive is missing.
> Can you make that a requred directive and throw an error if missing?
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aaron Devey [mailto:adevey at omniture.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 12:21 PM
> To: Rob Brown
> Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] no error if missing notification_options
> 
> I had this exact same problem last week with nagios 2.9.  It's a pain to
> track down since everything looks right.  The default of "no alerts" if
> the notification_options aren't set seems like a bad default.  If
> nothing else, emitting a warning during the config check (nagios -v
> nagios.cfg) would be helpful.
> 
> -Aaron
> 
> Rob Brown wrote:
>> Recently, I messed up my (version 2.2) configs and it took me a while
>> to figure out why I wasn't getting any alerts: turns out the scripts I
>> use to generate my configs were not writing out the
>> notification_options directive on my templates. Even though I had
>> notifications enabled everywhere, I was not getting alerts.
>> While admittedly, this was my problem and not Nagios', it would have
>> been nice to see a warning in the verification routine. Like:
>> Warning: service xyz has no notification options enabled.
>> That would have tipped me off right away.
>>
>> I checked this against a 3.0b2 version i'm running on a dev server and
>> it seemed to exhibit the same behavior. According to the docs, I
>> thought notification_options was a required directive? In that case,
>> shouldn't it throw an error?
>>
>> here's a snippit of a config that passes verify:
>>
>> define service {
>>        name                            generic-service
>>        max_check_attempts              3
>>        normal_check_interval           30
>>        retry_check_interval            15
>>        active_checks_enabled           1
>>        passive_checks_enabled          1
>>        check_period                    24x7
>>        parallelize_check               1
>>        freshness_threshold             0
>>        flap_detection_enabled          1
>>        retain_status_information       1
>>        retain_nonstatus_information    1
>>        notification_period             24x7
>>        notifications_enabled           1
>>        register                        0
>> }
>>
>> define service {
>>        hostgroup_name                  zzdummy
>>        service_description             zzdummy
>>        use                             generic-service
>>        check_command                   check_dummy
>>        contact_groups                  nagios_dev
>> }
>>
>> notice in the template: no notification_options
>> no alerts will ever be sent for this service.
>> Is this a bug or am I missing something?
>>
> 


Ethan Galstad,
Nagios Developer
---
Email: nagios at nagios.org
Website: http://www.nagios.org

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