Nagios Support Forum

I've been implementing Nagios XI in my organization and I knew at some point I would need to address the white elephant of priority levels with flexible notification periods. My organization has a need to have custom notification periods for different priority level services and I doubt that we are the first to have this problem. I'm curious how other organizations are handling this challenge?

The specifics of mine are probably simple compared to others. We have priority levels 1,2,3.

Level 1 is a 24x7 page
Level 2 is a page between 7 am - 10 pm, 7 days a week.
Level 3 is a page during business hours, M-F.

I've only been able to come up with two solutions personally that could handle this though i'm not sure if either of these are the best route.

Solution 1.

Have each service associated with a specific contact that would have these time periods defined. Example would be three separate contacts for the same destination mailbox with different time periods.

Solution 2.

As my organization has been migrating services to Nagios XI, i've had them adding a custom variable called _PRIORITY to each service check and defining what level. I could create a custom notification handler script (bash probably) that would look at the priority macro, then compare against a time frame defined in the script, if the two match up, it would send the notification out, otherwise it would exit with a status of 0 and nothing would be sent out.

I don't want to over complicate things but want to get this handled before the full organization is migrated over.

Any feedback would be great!

Thanks

-Nick

I think you hit the nail on the head with these two solutions, they are about the only way to manage this. Personally I think the latter option would be far cleaner and a better solution, as it keeps your contacts and configs much more clean. It also allows nagios to do it's thing, and yet still allows you to manage very specifically what you need to get out of custom notifications.