Service escalations without contacts or groups defined

[kevinkenny]

All of my service checks are based on templates where notifications are enabled, the notification period set to 24x7, notification type is set to U,C etc. But there are no contacts or contact groups associated in the service check templates.

When I add a new service check, the check is always based on one of these templates. However I still don't add any contacts or groups to the actual checks themselves.

The checks all get added to to a service group called "Critical-Services".

I also have a number of users who are members of a contact group called Duty-Admin-Pagers.

I have a service escalation configured with a linked contact group of Duty-Admin-Pagers (above) and with a servicegroup_name of Critical-Services, it looks like this:

define serviceescalation{
servicegroup_name Critical-Services
contact_groups Duty-Admin
contacts
first_notification 1
last_notification 999
notification_interval 1
escalation_period 24x7
escalation_options u,c
}

Whenever a service goes CRITICAL HARD and exceeds the number of retries I get pager alerts fired off just as I expect.

However when I load this configuration into Nagios I get warnings such as:

Warning Service 'APC-Power-Output' on host 'APC-PDU-0299' has no default contacts or contactgroups defined!

The escalation and notifications still work and still send notifications to the contact_group Duty-Admin defined in the service escalation.

I find this a convenient configuration because it means I don't have to explicitly define contacts or contact groups at either the service template or service check itself and makes management somewhat simpler.

Despite the warnings, and even though this configuration works just fine, is it recommended?