Nagios Support Forum

When we migrated from Nagios Core to Nagios XI I was told it was better to create and use templates for management. An issue that keeps coming up is different people and groups are requesting access to view the status of their system and get notifications for different services for their hosts. Currently, I have NonProd, Prod, etc hosts in a group using a template which our Server Management team gets notified for CPU, RAM, DIsk space, and a few monitoring service checks. Different Business Units want to received notifications for their disk checks and different services. The different services aren't the problem it is the disk space, CPU, RAM, etc items that are in the template. Is the best practice to just create new service checks and have the notifications be dispatched accordingly. Or should I remove the host from the template and just create each service check for the host individually and manage with Nagios XI bulk change feature? I am not sure what, if any, issues I would have if I just change out our Nagios XI implementation completely and have each host have it's own separate service checks. Currently, we have 2195 hosts with 12432 service checks. Managing these minor changes for specific hosts are becoming a pain but I am not certain if there is a better way to set all this up. Our Nagios XI server is running on VMware so I can increase RAM and CPU if needed but I am trying to simplify changes for different service checks so the appropriate groups receive and can see what they need to.

Going forward I was going to try and create a web page which would allow authorized users to add hosts and service checks using the automated host management in Nagios XI. I would like to remove myself as the "middle man" and let the Business Unit representative who knows their system setup the appropriate service checks accordingly. For the most part I just blindly add common checks based on the template, CPU, RAM, etc but only our Server Management group receive those. If I setup everything individually then I would have more flexibility on who sees what and who gets what notifications. If later on someone else or another groups needs to see or get notifications I can easily add them to the notifications section.

Long story short I am just trying to figure out if I break the service checks out to individual hosts what kind of load will that place on the server if any? Would I need to leverage mod gearman and not sure how complicated that would make the environment. I perform several various day-to-day tasks and monitoring is one of them so I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to this like it should be done. Unfortunately, trying to tell this to Management is like talking to a wall.

Thanks.

It is hard to give a definitive answer without knowing how many groups need the notifications for the same service but you could copy the existing service, create a new template and add that to the new service.
Or, you can create the service check tied to each business group and add the hosts to that check via a hostgroup. That would be another option.
Separating everything out to individual checks does give you the most flexibility but it still is harder to maintain in a large environment when you need to change the settings.

Breaking the host / service checks to individual settings shouldn't change the load of the server as when the configurations are loaded, they are parsed out to the individual settings and then run by the system.

Thanks that is what I was wondering if having separate configs for each host and the associated service checks for that host. With XI and the bulk change I think that is what I might look at as using templates are become difficult with all the minor setting changes everyone wants.

Thanks again.

Your welcome. If you don't have any more questions, shall I close up the post?

Sure you can close this. I was just basically trying to figure out if there is any load differences with using templates or not but it sounds like there isn't and templates just ease the administration.

Thanks again.