I don't know about others on this list, but what I do to start a new configuration: <div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 3:47 PM, D G Teed <<a href="mailto:donald.teed@gmail.com">donald.teed@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">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> 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? </blockquote><div> I start creating a directory named after the DataCenter or location, maybe: /opt/nagios/etc/object/Dallas There I create several files, each containing one host{} directive, without hostgroups or whatever. Then, the first service{name ping\n check_command\t check_icmp\nhostgroup_name all (...)} is applied to a hostgroup {hostgroup_name all\n alias all CIs\n members .*} (I've turned on the true regexp matching). With just these steps you can have all your CI's setup properly. HTH, </div></div>