Nagios Support Forum

Logs and output of show profile have been sent in PM.

I suspect that you're attempting to use the xi notification handlers, with a core contact, which will not work. The xi notification handlers will only apply to users of the XI system. It's hard to know for sure though, since we do not have a profile.

One error message I'm seeing may point to a full disk - What is the output of df -H? Could you please PM over your /usr/local/nagios/var/objects.cache so we can see how things are configured?

PM'd objects.cache.

I have tried both the generic and xi_contact contact templates, as well as the notify-service-by-email and xi-service-notification-handler service notification commands without success (as well as combinations of both). I thought that the generic contact template and notify-service-by-email handler were the ones to use for a core contact (even the contact is created and managed through the XI interface) based on another forum post so I tried those.

When the XI server is setup to use a SMTP server for it's mail method, you will have to use the following notifications commands. The others will not work.
xi_service_notification_handler
xi_host_notification_handler

You will also have to setup a user account in XI and also fill on the the SMS information for that user. A contact only will not work for this.
Take a look at these links for more details on setting up notifications in XI.
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf

Login as that user and verify the settings in the XI GUI for that user is correct as shown in the document.

We do not want to clutter up the system with a bunch of extra users who are actually only alert recipients but will never once log into Nagios. Further, if we have a user configured to receive notifications by both email and SMS, how do we control which they get? We are not looking to have every alert for a given recipient go to their email and phone. User1 might be configured to receive alerts for five systems but only the alerts for one of those needs to go to his phone (not broken out by severity or condition, only by source). It looks like if we configure User1 for both email and SMS then that user will receive all alerts they are set to get on both which is not good.

As for creating users and logging in as them, we use active directory for authentication and sharing of passwords is against company policy. As I cannot get the users' passwords to log in I would have to have them repeatedly enter their passwords as we test settings changes. This request would not go over well.

What changes would have to be made to make the contacts functionality work?

Breaking down this to address the specific points -

how do we control which they get?

From the Admin -> Mange Users you can masquerade as different users in your system to change settings. I do agree though, that a 'bulk' change would be helpful, so I filed a feature request for this. ID #10373

user1 might be configured to receive alerts for five systems but only the alerts for one of those needs to go to his phone (not broken out by severity or condition, only by source).

This is a good idea, to have granularity between notifications for different purposes. Obviously it doesn't matter if the internal IT wiki goes down, but if your main link to the building goes down that's another severity. I file a FR for this, #10374.

it looks like if we configure User1 for both email and SMS then that user will receive all alerts they are set to get on both which is not good.

This can be controlled by clicking the user you're logged in as in the top right, and select Notification Methods you can control what type of notifications are sent out. From the Notification Preferences page, you can specify the type of notifications you'd like to receive.

As for creating users and logging in as them, we use active directory for authentication and sharing of passwords is against company policy. As I cannot get the users' passwords to log in I would have to have them repeatedly enter their passwords as we test settings changes. This request would not go over well.

The masquerade part I mentioned above will address this.

What changes would have to be made to make the contacts functionality work?

Core depends on contacts, while XI depends on users for notifications. When you use the manage email settings handlers, it processes through SQL and checks these extra functions for if a notification should fire or not. This includes the Notification Preferences, and Notification Methods pages. Because of this, a user is needed to define those settings. If you'd like to use other handlers that do not go through this layer, you certainly can do that, but they would not respect the SMTP settings page.

it looks like if we configure User1 for both email and SMS then that user will receive all alerts they are set to get on both which is not good.

This can be controlled by clicking the user you're logged in as in the top right, and select Notification Methods you can control what type of notifications are sent out. From the Notification Preferences page, you can specify the type of notifications you'd like to receive.

This is actually more in line with what you have addressed with FR10374. We can turn email or SMS on or off at the user by setting the notification preferences, but not by user/source. So if we turn SMS off then the user would get no SMS notifications at all while if on they would get a SMS notification along with every email notification; all or nothing. Another way to do this would be to be able to have multiple contacts associated with a user, one for each contact option, eg user1-email and user1-cell both associated with user1 (same user name, different description or display name or what have you).

What changes would have to be made to make the contacts functionality work?

Core depends on contacts, while XI depends on users for notifications. When you use the manage email settings handlers, it processes through SQL and checks these extra functions for if a notification should fire or not.

This is interesting as when using a mix of contacts with associated users and standalone contacts the notification history would indicate a notification had been generated along with the usual dispatcher, information, etc. for that notification for both the user/contact and standalone contact but only the one with the user would be received. So the notification appears to be firing but processing stops there.

I appreciate the time you all have put into this for me. It looks like as it stands (creating a lot of new users and associated contacts was shot down by the higher-ups here) we will have to go without phone notifications.

I'm not sure if it will work for you but I have seen customers create a standard user jsmith and a separate jsmith_sms contact that they would assign to the ones they want SMS on.

I'm not sure if it will work for you but I have seen customers create a standard user jsmith and a separate jsmith_sms contact that they would assign to the ones they want SMS on.

This was actually one of the first things I tried when I was using my own account to test. Didn't work.

There is a document for using a contact only when using a SMTP server as the Mail Method.
Try it out and see if it works for you in your environment.
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... Mailer.pdf