single email alert to multiple contacts?

[Parish, Brent]

Agree totally!  

All alerts from Nagios go to the same post-processing script we built
and that's where they get shuffled off where they need to go, based on
user preferences.

We built a database and simple CGI interface (within Nagios pages).
Users click on the preferences link and "subscribe" to systems they are
interested in receiving alerts from.  They can then decide what email
address to send to, based on time of day, hostname, alert level, etc.

That takes virtually all the alert management off the Nagios maintainer
(me!) and allows people to modify their own contact information (e.g. at
work, send to instant messenger.  on vacation, send to phone.  At home,
send to home email. etc)

There are "fall through" rules that can optionally send to an admin
group mailbox (with appropriate verbiage in the alert message indicating
the fall through) if no one is subscribed to get the alert.

Finally, we built a quick & dirty "reporting" page that lists all
contacts for all services for all hosts, so we can glance through and
pin down gaps.




-----Original Message-----
From: Herb J. [mailto:nagios at herb-j.com] 
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2010 12:35 PM
To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] single email alert to multiple contacts?

Issues like this is just one of the reasons why we had to abstract out 
all notifications from Nagios to an external script. We have servers in 
a number of different locations, different platform groupings, 
escalation tiers, etc., as well as notifications sent by Jabber. They 
had to do to different people, with different escalation tiers, in 
different locations, who manage different groups of servers. With such a

variety of users receiving different emails, mailing lists were out of 
the question. It got to the point where the processing of service check 
data would be delayed by several seconds every time a notification 
needed to be sent. If an entire rack of machines or a whole platform 
went down, the check latency went through the roof due to all of the
delays.

The new system I put in place allows a single notification to be 
generated by Nagios, and regardless of how many people are configured to

receive it (be it 1 or 50), there was no delay in Nagios and there is no

need to use distribution lists.

Of course, the down side of this method is that this system isn't 
possible without a fairly complex management interface (the same one we 
use to build all of the config files).


On 08/20/2010 11:49 AM, Charlie Reddington wrote:
> On Aug 20, 2010, at 10:23 AM, Scott Nottingham wrote:
>
>    
>> Does anyone know how (or if it is even possible) to configure nagios
>> to send a single email to all contacts associated with the host/
>> service/etc as opposed to a separate email to each contact?
>>
>> The problem I'm facing is with emailing distribution lists.  If both
>> distribution_list_A and B contain user_A, said user ends up getting
>> 2 email for the same event.  If nagios could be configured to send a
>> single email to both distribution lists, our exchange server would
>> recognize that user_A is a member of both lists and send only 1
>> email to him.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide!
>>      
> Think of your exhange servers mailing lists as buckets. Bucket A is
> list A with user A in it. Bucket B is list B with user A in it.
>
> Each bucket is going to get an email, and that email is going to get
> copied to it's users.
>
> I don't think this way is going to be possible, unless you make
> another group, and put your groups in there. But I will bet that user
> a still gets 2 emails. But I can't say for certain, since it's been
> about 5 years since I used a exchange server.
>
> I would probably pull user a out, and let him get contacted separately
> with nagios, instead of depending on a group list if it's a big deal.
> The down side is this doesn't scale very well.
>
> Charlie
>
>
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