Nagios Support Forum

Hi All,

I have been attempting to find the best way to clone a host along with its attached services. Basically copying the host and services, giving it a new host name. This would greatly help deploying monitoring for our large clusters. Is this where creating a 'template' would be used? I tinkered with templates and the 'copy' feature in Nagios Core, but all it did was duplicate the host, none of its services.

Cheers,

Gavin

All of this is going to depend on the way in which you have set up the inheritance... My usual approach is to tie all services to a service group or host group and have that flow down to the host for example:
I might have one host group windows-servers and another exchange-servers. Any service that will be related to all windows-servers I will assign to that hostgroup in the service definition... and the same again for exchange servers.

So when I create an exchange server host definition it will inherit both the windows-servers and the exchange-servers host groups. This has the two distinct advantages the first is I can update all windows-servers with new checks (or remove them) with one assignment the other is when I clone an exchange server the definitions will be persistent on both because I have assigned the host groups from the host definition.

You can also use templates to achieve the same thing... there's 10 different ways to skin a cat you just have to pick the one that's easiest for you to manage.

Yeah that is just awesome. I have 15 servers in a cluster that have about 30 identical tests. I create each test once and assign it to a hostgroup and each node inherits the test. Much happiness. Thanks for pointing that out.

Cheers!

You're most welcome