Nagios implied and additive inheritance; possible bug?

[Jim Winkle]

I'd like to set up Nagios contact_groups in the following way (but it's not
working as expected):
1) In general, contact_groups for a host are notified about problems with the
host and any service on the host.
2) Occasionally, we'd like other contact_groups to be notified about problems
with certain services on the host.

If I'm understanding the documentation at
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/nagioscore/3/en/objectinheritance.html
correctly (I'm running (3.3.1), it indicates that #1 can be done using implied
inheritance and #2 by using additive inheritance, but it's not working as
expected.  I've found other posts from people with the same issue, but never any
resolution.

For example, if I define:

define host{
        host_name               linux-server
        contact_groups          linux-admins
        ...
        }

define service{
        host_name               linux-server
        service_description     l_proc_sshd
        contact_groups          +management
        ...
        }


I would like this to be equivalent to:

define service{
        host_name               linux-server
        service_description     l_proc_sshd
        contact_groups          linux-admins,management
        ...
        }

But instead, the implied inheritance of "linux-admins" is ignored, and it's
equivalent to:

define service{
        host_name               linux-server
        service_description     l_proc_sshd
        contact_groups          management
        ...
        }

So contact_groups is overwritten rather than added to.  No warnings/errors were
generated about the plus sign being used inappropriately or anything else.

Am I misunderstanding the documentation?  Is this possibly a bug?

If this is not the way it's intended to work, could Nagios be easily enhanced to
support this?  It seems very logical and powerful, and apparently other people
are thinking along the same lines as I am.  I posted this on the nagios-users
list where people confirmed that it doesn't work for them, either.  They
suggested a workaround using escalations, but it seems like that's a more
complicated solution and less logical (there are no escalations happening, just
regular notifications).

Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this!
 
-- Jim



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