Best grouping practices?

[cwscribner]

Hi all.

I'm trying to simplify my administration responsibilities on my Nagios XI server and I wanted to run my idea by some pros before executing it. Here's the idea:

Hostgroup: windows-servers
Servicegroup: windows-servers
Config files:
windows-servers CPU Usage
windows-servers RAM Usage
windows-servers Uptime
windows-servers C:\ Space
etc...

What I would be doing is applying the windows-servers config files to a windows-servers hostgroup, then add the windows-servers hostgroup as a member of the windows-servers servicegroup. My thought is that the config files would be the base for every device in the windows-servers hostgroup, and that hostgroup would be included in the service group. So going forward, all I would have to do is add a device to the windows-servers hostgroup and it would automatically inherit what servicegroup is belonged to and subsequently the services that should be monitored on it. The end goal being a connection between config files, hostgroup, and servicegroup. Is there any harm in doing the grouping this way? Will it make things easier/harder? Will there be any issues adding/removing devices? Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. I don't want to make my life more difficult down the road.

[mguthrie]

For large implementations like yours, the setup you described sounds pretty solid, and typically people with larger setups organize their definitions either with groups or with templates, depending on how their environment is set up. As long as you're centralizing as many config options as you can into a single place to avoid repeats, that's generally the way to go. I think your setup will save you a lot of time down the road.

The only potential complication I could ever see arising from this is if you had service escalations defined for those services, and then for some reason you had to run the import process again. This is due to a limitation in our current import procedure related to service escalations. However, the chances are pretty slim that you would ever need to do this, and if you do regular DB backups you can avoid this complication altogether.

All in all, I think you've got a fairly solid plan.

[cwscribner]

Thanks for the prompt input! I feel much better about going this way now. Luckily, I don't foresee service escalations being a problem. Right now there is just a general pager that handles all alerts, so there's no escalations in place. Two quick questions.

1) Will the import issue be fixed or is it a "have to live with" type of problem?

2) Is there a way (that I missed) to group devices by servicegroup without selecting thousands of devices? In other words, do I have to do 1) make configs, 2) apply to hostgroup, and 3) set hostgroup as member of servicegroup, or can I somehow apply the configs to a servicegroup then just put a device in a servicegroup? I couldn't find a way to apply configs to a servicegroup...although it seems like that should be able to happen.

[mguthrie]

1) Will the import issue be fixed or is it a "have to live with" type of problem?

The issue has been around for a while, and it's a "we have to fix this somehow but it's really going to suck when we do" type of issue ; )

2) Is there a way (that I missed) to group devices by servicegroup without selecting thousands of devices? In other words, do I have to do 1) make configs, 2) apply to hostgroup, and 3) set hostgroup as member of servicegroup, or can I somehow apply the configs to a servicegroup then just put a device in a servicegroup? I couldn't find a way to apply configs to a servicegroup...although it seems like that should be able to happen.

The configs are extemely flexible in how you can set them up. You can apply a single service definition to an entire hostgroup. You can have a hostgroup or servicegroup assignment in a template, so that way anything created with that template will already have the group relationship.

You've probably seen these already, but if you haven't they're definitely worth a read for the kind of setup you're doing.
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/ ... tance.html
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/ ... ricks.html

[cwscribner]

So it sounds like I should explore templating a bit more to perfect my solution...thanks! Case closed!