Karssen, Your problem appears to be process not the tool. I am not suggesting how to conduct business in your organization but here is my suggestion. I would reach out to noc management and put together a wiki or how to for each unique possible critical alert scenario. The I would add the "notes_url" parameter of Nagios to point to that particular wiki page. Only thing noc has to do click on the notes_url page and they will know exactly what to do with the alert. Thanks <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 3:40 AM, L.C. Karssen <<a href="mailto:lennart.karssen@snow.nl">lennart.karssen@snow.nl</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Dear list, I'm presently working on a Nagios 3.2.0 setup that monitors approximately 1000 hosts and about 5000 services. The setup doesn't make use of Nagios' notification system, instead people at a control center (NOC) use the Nagios web interface to alert the appropriate people in case of an alert. The Nagios configuration is based on a set of host (group) templates, where services are assigned to host groups. For example: the 'check_swap' service definition is associated with the host group 'all unix hosts'. The problem I'm confronted with is that the people at the NOC don't need to see all services on a given host. For example, they shouldn't call the sysadmin at night if an SSL certificate check goes into critical state because the certificate is only valid for ten more days. So we want to remove that service from their view. In the present situation contact groups (used to determine which servers are visible to which department) are added to each specific host, but according to the Nagios docs (<a href="http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/cgiauth.html" target="_blank">http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/cgiauth.html</a>) a contact group can see _all_ services on a given host if it is listed as a contract group for the host. So I decided to remove the NOC contact group from the individual host definitions and to assign the NOC contact group only to specific services. This leads me to another problem. Some service checks (i.e. host groups) are used in one department only. This works fine. However, some other service checks (like check_swap for the 'all unix hosts' hostgroup) are shared by all departments, but some departments don't want the NOC to see check_swap alerts whereas others do want to pass these alerts to NOC. It would be possible to make services with slightly different names (e.g. check_swap_dept1, check_swap_dept2), each with the correct contact group. However, that seems to be a needless increase of complexity. Another approach would be to make host groups for each department and somehow change the service contact group for each host group. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get that to work. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated. Lennart Karssen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. <a href="http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com" target="_blank">http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com</a> _______________________________________________ Nagios-users mailing list <a href="mailto:Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net">Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net</a> <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users" target="_blank">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users</a> ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null </blockquote></div> -- Cordially, Shadhin Rahman