I'm looking for a streamlined method of configuring the check_fping test for hundreds of network switches. Looking at the examples I see for hosts and hostgroup configuration, e.g.: <a href="http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=5caea3690911120551o40031fe3o3994b8fc8b463143%40mail.gmail.com">http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=5caea3690911120551o40031fe3o3994b8fc8b463143%40mail.gmail.com</a> I can't see doing it that way, with a list of 400+ IPs in a single hostgroup. There must be a better way to do this. With the fping command (not check_fping) I can feed it a list of IPs to check from a file. If I ran fping with -a and did a diff between that output and my original list of IPs, I'd get a report of which switches are down. I could write a shell script to do this and set up a cron in less time than it would take to do the same in nagios with my current knowledge of the configuration options in nagios. I'm sure someone will be up to the challenge of showing me it is just as easy to set up in nagios. I saw this example: <a href="%20http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/monitoring-routers.html"> http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/monitoring-routers.html</a> but I don't get "allhosts, switches" in the hostgroups configuration. Is this some sort of keyword or built-in wildcard?