alerts - where to set and how to tell the effective settings

[caterpillartce]

Hello,

I see both hosts and services can have alert settings configured. So which one takes priority? How to find out the effective setting?

While I am typing this, it suddenly occurred to me, I may have been thinking it wrong that hosts are kind of parents to services... Maybe they are all separated and independent to each other. Host alert settings are only effective for host status, and service alert settings are effective for the monitoring services?

Please advise.

Thanks
Jessica Zhang

[rkennedy]

The only kind of inheritance through notifications between host <-> service is going to be implied inheritance. See this link - https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... tance.html

Otherwise, each host / service will operate independently, and your statement is correct.

Host alert settings are only effective for host status, and service alert settings are effective for the monitoring services

The only exception, is going to be the implied inheritance which I linked above.

[gormank]

"...and service alert settings are effective for the monitoring services."

A Nagios service is not the same as a service in a host at all. A Nagios service is a check, either active or passive that can create an alert, and possibly send a notification if the result of the check is > 0.
A host check is typically (but not always) check_ping which tells if a host is reachable.
I seem to recall reading that if a host is unreachable, notifications for the services will be disabled, since they should all fail. An exception would be SNMP traps, since they're asynchronous.
You could check by setting the last octet of a host w/ active service checks to 256. Then wait and see what notifications go out.

[ssax]

caterpillartce, does that answer your questions?

[caterpillartce]

Yes, thank you all!

If all my servers are being monitored by the same services, but I now have a need to send service alert to a different group of people for some of my servers, how should I configure that? If I configure through services, I suppose all servers will get the same settings since they are all using those services?

Thanks!

[ssax]

The best way to do this would be to assign the contacts/contactgroups to the host and not define them on the services, that way they will inherit them from the hosts and alert the proper people, otherwise you would need to create a separate service for each one that is different.

Please read here for more information on inheritance:

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... tance.html

Let us know if you have any questions.


Thank you