My real problem I think is that I 'whittled' it down in the wrong way (thanks for the help, everyone). Below is what I was hoping to do, but realize that b/c I HAVE to define a host w/ the escalation, I have to retool how my monster config is done (which will really suck). Here's what I was hoping to accomplish: 1) Create a generic service template that all service checks inherit that adds them to the 'all-services' group. 2) Create escalation rules that apply to the 'all-services' group. This worked (basically a more complicated example of the config I gave) until I added a 'all-services-foo' group (same method mentioned in #1 and #2) with different escalations. From a design perspective, I know Nagios does a great job w/ templating, and object inheritance, but it really sucks that I have to specify a host; that just increased the amount of objects easily by an order or so of magnitude. Best, Eric <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 6:48 AM, Paul M. Dubuc <<a href="mailto:work@paul.dubuc.org">work@paul.dubuc.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> First, your service has no service_description specified. This is required. Second, your serviceescalation must include the host_name that the service is assigned to. Add the line: host_name <a href="http://admin.qa" target="_blank">admin.qa</a> and it will work. You can also use a hostgroup_name instead of a host_name, but every host you specify must have a service with a service_description that matches that specified in the escalation. See the documentation for details: <a href="http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/nagioscore/3/en/objectdefinitions.html" target="_blank">http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/nagioscore/3/en/objectdefinitions.html</a> Eric B. wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="im"> This has me stumped. I whittled my ugly config down to 35 lines, and was still able to re-create the error. Any ideas what is wrong? I'm running Nagios Core v. 3.2.3. Much thanks in advance! -Eric Error is: Error: Could not expand servicegroups specified in service escalation (config file '/home/opsmon/etc/nagios/objects/qbo/foo.cfg', starting on line 13) Error processing object config files! Here's the config: define servicegroup { servicegroup_name group-1 alias All Services register 0 } define contact { contact_name primary-oncall alias Primary Oncall </div> email <a href="mailto:foo@bar.com" target="_blank">foo@bar.com</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:foo@bar.com" target="_blank">foo@bar.com</a>><div class="im"> } define serviceescalation { servicegroup_name group-1 first_notification 1 last_notification 6 notification_interval 5 contacts primary-oncall } define service { servicegroups group-1 </div> host_name <a href="http://admin.qa" target="_blank">admin.qa</a> <<a href="http://admin.qa" target="_blank">http://admin.qa</a>><div class="im"> check_command check_foo } define host { </div> host_name <a href="http://admin.qa" target="_blank">admin.qa</a> <<a href="http://admin.qa" target="_blank">http://admin.qa</a>><div class="im"> address 127.0.0.1 } define command { command_name check_foo command_line /bin/true } </div><div class="im"> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. <a href="http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2" target="_blank">http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2</a> _______________________________________________ Nagios-users mailing list <a href="mailto:Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net" target="_blank">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 </div></blockquote> </blockquote></div>