XI versus Core templates

[DFaught]

I am relatively new to Nagios but trying to map out some details of building a global enterprise monitoring solution. We will have many thousands of hosts and services being monitored by Nagios XI in the near future. It seems like there are some places where XI goes in its own direction instead of leveraging the facilities of Core. Specifically with templates. I very much want to use templates to build and maintain many thousands of host and service definitions, but it took me a while to figure out that the templates that the XI wizards use and the templates that the Core Config Manager (CCM) use are very separate and distinct things. I want to use the XI wizards, but it seems like the templates available there are much less capable than the ones available through CCM.

For one thing, if I make a change to an XI wizard template, then I need to go through the wizard all over again for every host that used that template in order to implement the template change. Am I doing this wrong?

Are there some best practices for the use of XI wizard templates versus CCM templates in an XI environment? What are other doing with this?

Thank you for any useful input.

[tmcdonald]

It sounds like you might be confusing configuration templates with wizard templates, which is admittedly not very good naming on our part.

Config templates in the CCM work just the same as they do in Core - you apply them to hosts and services, and can make mass changes just by editing the template.

Wizard templates are "recorded" sessions of running through a wizard, which you can choose to use as defaults when running it again. The difference here being that a config template's settings are stored in the config template definition, whereas the settings in the wizard template are applied directly to the host or services being created.

[DFaught]

Thank you for the explanation. This sounds a lot like if I want to use config templates then I should avoid using wizards because the filled-in fields for the created host will override any config templates added later. Do I have that right?

[tgriep]

Yes, that is correct. Running a Wizard will fill in the default settings which will negate the template's settings.