Parent Child assignments from a Parent perspective

[SteveBeauchemin]

We all know that Parent / Child relationships are crucial to sending notifications in a proper way at the proper time. If a parent is down, the Child objects may be up, so why alert on them. Hence my methodology of using a pseudo host that is actually a default gateway IP masquerading as a host. Some routers and switches could have dozens of VLANs defined. I have decided to treat each of the default gateways as a host, and to use that host as a parent to all the systems using that IP space. So, to represent a large data center switch with many VLAN configured, in Nagios, I will create a host for the switch Management IP, and additional hosts for each VLAN defined. A single switch could cause me to create dozens of Nagios hosts in order to get the Parent / Child definitions in place. The VLAN hosts have no service tests associated, just a ping test.

Enough for the back story.

With this in mind, I would like to be able to open a Parent, and assign to that parent all the child objects. In Nagios XI, all I can see at this time is that I have to open each host and assign a parent. From the way my systems are organized, that is a backward methodology. I have a large site, and have many subnets, and many VLANs. This takes a very long time to open each host to assign a parent.

Please let me know how to open a Parent and assign Children. Is this capability something that is coming?

Thanks.

Steve B

[snapon_admin]

Wouldn't the Bulk Modification tool in CCM do what you're looking for? That's how we do it anyway. Configure > CCM > Tools > Bulk Modifications > Add a Parent host. I believe this was added in XI 2014, so you'd have to be running that version to do this.

[slansing]

As Snap-On mentioned, currently the way to do this would be to use the Bulk Mod Tool, since there is no way to open a host and select children. The thing is, really any host can be a parent, or a child of a parent, that other half is just not displayed for configuration, or built into Core that way currently.

[SteveBeauchemin]

Thanks for the replies. That does solve the assignment aspect.

Yet, a specific tool would be better in that you could look at a host and see the child assignments. It would be the same as looking in a Host Group and seeing the Hosts assigned. Visibility into the configuration would be improved. Seeing assignments in both directions in the GUI directly would stop me from having to create my own tool that provides the visibility.

Thanks.

Steve B

[sreinhardt]

I would agree that this could be a very useful tool. Would you mind submitting a feature request on tracker.nagios.com and detailing your thoughts? Then if you could link that back here, I will make an associated internal feature request and link the two. This way it gets pushed through a bit faster, and you can see the progress too.

[SteveBeauchemin]

Added item to tracker

http://tracker.nagios.com/view.php?id=546

Thanks.

Steve B

[sreinhardt]

Linked to an internal request. Thanks for adding that, hopefully it gets made sooner rather than later!