Nagios implied and additive inheritance

[Jim Winkle]

I'd like to set up Nagios so that:
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, 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'm not using escalations, but a cursory read makes it appear to be supported there.

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

--
Jim

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