Confusing behavior when adding a contact to a host in GUI

[wtaillac]

So, I was asked to make our up-until-this-point internal use only Nagios server (4.0.6) accessible to some of our downstream clients so they can have a view into our monitoring dashboard for some of their equipment. A quick Google search led me to create the user in htpasswd.users, and then add that user to my contacts.cfg and to the contacts field in the host they should be able to see from the GUI.

All of this seems to work, but with one exception; the user gets the ability to view the up/down status of not only the single host I added them to as a contact, but also to all of the other hosts within any of the hostgroups that the target host belongs to. This behavior is not desired.

I've included a picture of a live example - http://i.imgur.com/GuuCHcy.png is the link. In the picture, the client user was added as a contact to the host k-chicago-xo-comcast, which is a member of two hostgroups: k-infrastructure and client-firewalls. That's the only host that the user was added to, but the dashboard has brought along a bunch of extra info. Attempts to drill down into the extra hosts on the dashboard do result in an access denied, but it's still far more information than I want to present.

I've done some basic Googling as well as a search on these forums and came up blank, or with the inability to find the particular needle in the haystack of results I received, so I'm hoping someone will point something out to me nice and easy and I'll feel simultaneously a bit stupid and grateful when the fix is super obvious.

Thanks!

[sreinhardt]

This is actually intentional, as the idea that hosts or services in the same groupings, will often have administrators that need to view other hosts\services statuses. You could look into integrating something like BPI, where you can give the current status of hosts and services that client needs to see, and simply not add other hosts and services. This has the added benefit of restricting them from the main core interface, which is always nice.