load on mail server due to alerts

[cyient]

Hi Team,

During the alerts generation there will be thousands of alerts being generated for any service or host notification and due to which there is lot of load on the SMTP server.

Is there any option to limit the alerts regarding the service/host notification to a contact upto X no of alerts ?

Apart from Escalation mechanism, i'm looking at any other options.

[sreinhardt]

Are you getting thousands of alerts from a single host or service issue, or overall nagios is sending thousands of alerts? There is a big difference in the sense of nagios sending thousands for a single issue is probably severely malfunctioning or mis-configured. If you are sending a few alerts per host or service and have many that are failing, then nagios is acting as expected and there are simply a lot of issue prone items you are monitoring. Just want to be sure we are talking about exactly the same thing.

Otherwise in short, there is not a way, unless you want to use escalations or only send one alert per issue to limit the number sent. Changing your notification interval is usually a good step, but using escalations and setting something such as "after 10 notifications, no longer send alerts" is probably the safest and most clean route of altering this other than interval changes.

[cyient]

Are you getting thousands of alerts from a single host or service issue, or overall nagios is sending thousands of alerts? There is a big difference in the sense of nagios sending thousands for a single issue is probably severely malfunctioning or mis-configured. If you are sending a few alerts per host or service and have many that are failing, then nagios is acting as expected and there are simply a lot of issue prone items you are monitoring. Just want to be sure we are talking about exactly the same thing.

Otherwise in short, there is not a way, unless you want to use escalations or only send one alert per issue to limit the number sent. Changing your notification interval is usually a good step, but using escalations and setting something such as "after 10 notifications, no longer send alerts" is probably the safest and most clean route of altering this other than interval changes.

overall nagios is sending thousands of alerts, is it possible to limit the frequency of the alerts being sent ?

[lmiltchev]

The "default" notification_interval in Nagios XI is set to 60, which means that nagios will wait for 1 hour (60 min) before re-notifying a contact if the host or service is still in a "problem" state. You can increase this value, so that nagios won't be alerting contacts as often. You can do this on a host/service level or on a template level. Keep in mind that local settings will override the template, and that modifying a template will have an impact on all hosts/services that are using it.
Modifying this value for many hosts/services could be a tedious job. However, if you had a Nagios XI Enterprise Edition, you could use the Bulk Modifications Tool to change the notification_interval's value for many/all hosts/services with one go. Hope this helps.