Services, ServiceGroups and Service Templates

[gregwhite]

We are building a new Nagios environment and using lessons learned from our current setup to implement a more structured configuration based on standards. Our goal is to separate the management of Hosts and Services. By doing this we can reduce the number of Hostgroups we currently have into logical hostgroups and not based on service checks. Our service checks will be managed through services, servicegroups and service templates. Our top level hostgroup is Window Servers. this contains all the window servers we manage. To this hostgroup we have 3 groups of services we want to check. Looking at backups as an example, we want to take all backup service checks and put them in a Backup Servicegroup. Then using the Service template assign the Backup Servicegroup and all the hosts that will have these service checks applied. In our current environment this required us to create two additional hostgroups: one for Backups and one for Hosts that do not get a backup. If there are a couple of servers that need an additional service check, this can be done by using services, servicegroups and service templates and not by creating another hostgroup.
This is our goal, my question is, after this long winded explanation, can this be done as described?

[abrist]

You are on the right track, though you may be a bit off in your understanding of servicegroups. They are used mostly for object tricks and display/report grouping. In essence you do not assign services to hosts with servicegroups, but you take actions on the servicegroups like making a report or configuring escalations. If you want to assign groups of services to hosts, create some checks and assign them to a hostgroup, in that way any hosts added will inherit the checks. Use servicegroups for reporting, escalations, dependencies, and logical grouping for display in the UI.