Nagios Support Forum

Question 1 - How to limit the number of notification emails sent.
What is the proper way to limit the number of notifications sent when a host is down?

For example even if I have check settings Max Attempts set for 2, I can get 6 or more emails for a down host. We only want one email when the host is down. The only option I could see that might work is to increase the notification interval to a long period, 8 to 12 hours for example.

Question 2 - We never get recovery notifications. We have all of our hosts set to send a recovery notification, but the notifications are never generated.

Our check command is Check Host Alive:
$USER1$/check_ping -4 -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -w 3000.0,80% -c 5000.0,100% -p 5

grantdoug wrote:For example even if I have check settings Max Attempts set for 2, I can get 6 or more emails for a down host. We only want one email when the host is down. The only option I could see that might work is to increase the notification interval to a long period, 8 to 12 hours for example.

It might be that you're getting service notifications before the host is going down. This is explained in more detail here: http://sites.box293.com/nagios/guides/c ... -intervals

Can you provide 3 example emails. Looking at these emails will give us a lot more detail.

The notification emails all look exactly like this.

Have you tried modifying the notification_interval (under the alert settings tab)? Setting it to to zero will mean only one notification will be sent no matter how many times a host is detected as down. I haven't tried setting this to other values, but hopefully you can find a happy medium if setting it to zero is not desirable.

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... tions.html


notification_interval: This directive is used to define the number of "time units" to wait before re-notifying a contact that this service is still down or unreachable. Unless you've changed the interval_length directive from the default value of 60, this number will mean minutes. If you set this value to 0, Nagios will not re-notify contacts about problems for this host - only one problem notification will be sent out.

grantdoug wrote:Question 1 - How to limit the number of notification emails sent.
Question 2 - We never get recovery notifications. We have all of our hosts set to send a recovery notification, but the notifications are never generated.

can you verify that the contact for the host is set to receive recovery notifications?

grantdoug, whenever you have a moment, let us know if you've had a chance to try any of the suggestions from the two previous posts and what the outcome was, thanks.

Thanks @ Nozlaf for the suggestion to enable notifications at the user. Looking at overnight notifications, we think your suggestion fixed the problem (#2 No Host Up Notification). Regarding problem #1 which is to limit total notifications, we have tried the 0 retry setting and find that it also blocks recovery notifications. We do observe that Nagios notifications stop AFTER the problem is acknowledged in Tactical Overview. We have therefore decided to focus organizationally on procedures to rapidly acknowledge host problems. After doing so, generally we see only one email for a down host.

Thanks for that update and glad to hear a solution has been found. Did you have any other questions on the topic, or may we close this thread?

** OP gave permission to close thread via PM, closing thread now **