newbie question - making a system in a down state report as OK

[Brian Huff]

Hello,

I am in process of contemplating a move from Big Brother to Nagios. I
am a system admin over a software/hardware development lab facility
for telco systems. Our lab consists of several hundred systems.  There
are some limitations I am running into with BB,  and I like the
ability to use ssh to perform checks in Nagios..  I really like what I
am seeing in Nagios for the vast majority of my systems.  We have
about 50 simulator boxes that are turned on when needed,  and off when
not in use for heat load considerations.  So down would be an OK
state,  and the monitor system would just mainly track usage.   In Big
Brother there was a 'dialup' directive that when a host or service was
down it was in an acceptable state,  and to go from green to clear and
not send critical reports.  This worked well for these systems.  When
they were down they did not 'count' against the overall up/down % that
management likes to stress over.  Is there a similar state in nagios? 
I have RTFM,  and don't know if I have missed something or didn't
understand the terminology.  As it sits now on my tactical overview I
see way too much red & yellow when everything is operating as desired.

One other question,  I want to split up my hosts.cfg file by up
networks,  I see and understand how to do that.  The question is,  are
host templates only valid within that file or are they global?.  So
could I have lets say have a hosttempl.conf file and have the several
hostsXXX.cfg use the templates in hosttempl.conf?

Running nagios 2.0B4 on CentOS4.0 on Intel P4

Thanks
Brian


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