Service status flapping

[fao]

A check is returning a flapping status service and that leads to many alerts as the service is changing status in a limited time period.
How to configure Nagios to send only one alert in such case?

[agriffin]

What do you mean when you say your check is returning a flapping status? If you have a plugin that tries to detect flapping on its own Nagios will be unable to do what you want. Nagios is only able to interpret the states: OK, WARNING, CRITICAL, and UNKNOWN. Flapping is calculated based on how much a host or service is changing states in some time period. In XI, you can change the flapping threshold in the 'Nagios Core Main Config File' section of the Core Configuration Manager as well as enable or disable flapping detection altogether.

[fao]

We've configured a free space check on physical disks with a critical level at 300MB. In a 15 min time slot, the amount of free space on the disk is going above and below this threshold too many times.
For this reason, too many alerts are sent out.

[mguthrie]

Yeah, you'll want to enable flap detection, and adjust the thresholds to meet your needs. You can also set the "first_notification_delay" which will wait X amount of minutes before sending any notifications. That could also be useful with a lot of state changes like you're describing.
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/flapping.html