service with "notifications_enabled=0" still notifies

[lyle]

This is a question on our Core 3.0.3 installation:

In some Service Definitions, I set "notifications_enabled=0" but the service still sends out notifications. I didn't disable the notifications in the Core web interface for this service check, but I assumed disabling them in the service definition would do it.

In the Core version 3.x documentation, I notice there's an asterisk next to this and other directive descriptions, but I haven't found where it's meaning is defined.

Thanks for any advice....Lyle

[tonyyarusso]

The asterisk refers to this:

Retention Notes

It is important to point out that several directives in host, service, and contact definitions may not be picked up by Nagios when you change them in your configuration files. Object directives that can exhibit this behavior are marked with an asterisk (*). The reason for this behavior is due to the fact that Nagios chooses to honor values stored in the state retention file over values found in the config files, assuming you have state retention enabled on a program-wide basis and the value of the directive is changed during runtime with an external command.

One way to get around this problem is to disable the retention of non-status information using the retain_nonstatus_information directive in the host, service, and contact definitions. Disabling this directive will cause Nagios to take the initial values for these directives from your config files, rather than from the state retention file when it (re)starts.