Why distinguish hosts from services?

[Holger Weiss]

* matthias eble <matthias.eble at mailing.kaufland-informationssysteme.com> [2008-08-07 13:48]:
> On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 14:17 +0200, Holger Weiss wrote:
> > Note that I don't doubt the usefulness of syntactic configuration sugar,
> > such as the implicit service->host dependencies or the nice and simple
> > way of mapping the network topology using the "parents" directive.  The
> > thing I don't really understand is why Nagios distinguishes hosts from
> > services internally (outside the configuration parser).  However, I may
> > well be overlooking something, so I figured I'd ask what it is :-)
> ???
> I think some stripped down host configuration should be kept. sth like
> 
> define host {
> host_name foo
> address 127.0.0.1
> avail_service icmp_service
> }
> 
> where icmp_service would be a common service
> and would prevent some redundant config parser code I think.
> 
> But if you understood you correctly, you are asking for internal rather
> than configuration changes.

Yes, though I could also imagine a syntax which gives the user control
over the implicit dependencies of arbitrary user-defined object types.
But that's not my main point indeed.

> This would mean having a "monitoring object" rather than host or
> service structures, and automatically created object dependencies
> (services still rely on the monitored "host").

Yes.

> Beside that, the states for hosts and services differ (hosts have an
> unreachable state as well as state texts differ).

Yes, that's one of the differences in the current implementation, but I
don't really understand why this difference is required.

> With one monitoring object, unreachable states would automatically be
> valid for services, too.

Yes!  It's a feature (see Ton's reply)! :-)

Holger

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