Server Name in the Nagios Alert Message

[itIsMrKevin]

Hi,
We are running Nagios Core 3.2.3 on a machine running CentOS 5.9.

I shutdown our Mail Mirror Server for a few minutes and we got the following alert message from Nagios:
** PROBLEM Service Alert: Mail Server/HTTPS Test is CRITICAL **


The wording of the alert would indicate to me that the problem is with our production mail server.

I logged into the Nagios Configuration file and found the following entry for production mail server:
define host{
use
host_name
alias Mail Server ; A longer name associated with the host
address
}



I saw the following entry for our mail mirror server:
define host{
use
host_name
alias Mail Mirror Server ; A longer name associated with the host
address
}

NOTE: I removedt the values for "use", "host_name" and "address" for both the production mail server and the mail mirror server above.

As you can see the alias for production mail server is "Mail Server" while the alias for mail mirror server is "Mail Mirror Server".

My questions are:
1) Does the Nagios alert message use the "alias" value from the host definition when it gives the name of the server in the alert message?
2) If the above is true, then why did the Nagios alert message seem to use the alias value from the production mail server and not the alias from our mail mirror server?
3) If the Nagios alert message does not use the alias value from the host defintion for the server name, where does it get the server name?

Thanks to anyone who can give me some guidance here.

[slansing]

The Nagios mail handlers do use the host/service alias by default. It should not have given you an alert for another host's alias unless the alert was from that host. I would look back through your nagios logs to that time to see exactly which host would have triggered the notification.

In addition, have you been verifying your configuration files when you change them? You could have some serious misconfiguration.