Reoccurring downtime and alert vs notifications

[gregwhite]

When you put a device or hostgroup in reoccurring downtime do you actually suppress alerts and notifications? I had seen a video of your demonstration of how to use that feature and they used alerts and notifications interchangeably so I am still confused. The ideal scenario for us would be to have a group of network routers go into reoccurring downtime during the evening because of heavy backup traffic. The alerts and notifications would be suppressed so the NOC would not see the alerts on their Operations Screen. But the data would still be collected in the event log and you would have graph data collected so you can always go back and view the graphs if you needed to trouble shoot an issue.

Hope this is clear,
Thanks,

[bwallace]

A few things to consider with recurring downtime:

- alerts and notifications are two different things (so yeah, they should not be used interchangeably)
- Recurring downtime will suppress notifications but NOT alerts
- The downtime will still show up in reports but when expanding the advanced options in reporting you'll have an option to "hide scheduled downtime"
- If the 's' option is enabled in the host or service notifications options, then any associated contact will receive a "downtime begin" and downtime end" email notification

notification_options: This directive is used to determine when notifications for the service should be sent out. Valid options are a combination of one or more of the following: w = send notifications on a WARNING state, u = send notifications on an UNKNOWN state, c = send notifications on a CRITICAL state, r = send notifications on recoveries (OK state), f = send notifications when the service starts and stops flapping, and s = send notifications when scheduled downtime starts and ends. If you specify n (none) as an option, no service notifications will be sent out. If you do not specify any notification options, Nagios will assume that you want notifications to be sent out for all possible states. Example: If you specify w,r in this field, notifications will only be sent out when the service goes into a WARNING state and when it recovers from a WARNING state.

For what scripts/services manage these settings, refer to this doc on what goes on under the hood:
https://support.nagios.com/kb/article.php?id=61

-Hope this helps, certainly let us know if there are any other questions -

[gregwhite]

Thanks! Sometimes people uses alerts and notification interchangeably so I needed to verify what to expect. You cleared it up.
It would be nice for our NOC not to have to see alerts from devices in downtime but I feel it is important to collect the data whether it is in downtime or not.

Greg

[bwallace]

Thanks, and glad to help! I'll lock this thread now...