Nagios Support Forum

Is there a way to group hosts together specifically for organizational purposes on the "Service Overview For All Host Groups" page without assigning any service checks to them, and at the same time group hosts together to assign service checks without that 2nd group being displayed on that same page?

I'm thinking I would like to group hosts that are associated with each other, but have no service checks in common. I know how to negate checks from being applied to machines (!hostname), but if there was a way to have 2 "types" of hostgroups: 1 strictly for organization and 1 strictly for object (or service) inheritance.

Related: does anyone have a good doc/url that has some "philosophy(?)" or best practice for this type of thing? I'm struggling with fixing the current mess I've inherited and the best way to re-organize everything. In my current setup, I'm having a hard time linking hosts with the checks that they are getting...are they coming from hostgroup membership? Servicegroups? Individual services being applied to a host? etcetcetc.

Obviously you can't solve the last part, I'm just looking for a new way to organize this so that I can make sense of what's happening and make it easier for add/change/del in the future.

I think the first part of your problem answers itself. In the "Service Overview For All Host Groups" page the title of the page itself implies that services are the focus. You can certainly have a hostgroup of hosts with no services, but then certain specific pages like this one may not be of any use (if they even display anything at all).

Regarding the best practices, that's a pretty broad set of answers I could give. In truth, there is no "best" way to do it, and if you ask 10 different people you will get 12 different answers. Personally, I like to put a host in a hostgroup to inherit most of the common checks, and to control the group membership from the hostgroup definition, but that's just me. Other people will swear by assigning the host to a group from the host definition. At the end of the day, what matters is consistency with bonus points for documentation.