Handling alerts / User actions in distribution list scenario

[vazudevan]

In our setup all notifications are to be sent to distribution group, and not individual users / groups. When we create users as linked core contacts (recommend method), The challenge faced is; if a user responds to notification and chooses to disables notification. That action applies only to that particular user and not for everyone in the group.

Instead the requirement was if anyone from the group disables notification it should apply to all users. (Same for enable notifications)

As a workaround, Currently, we have created AD users without linked core contacts. (permissions: see all objects, can access advanced features tab) Also, we have DLs created as dummy users (login disabled). These DL contacts are associated to Host / Services Objects.

With this, if a notification is disabled by one person, it gets disabled to all in the group, and works as expected. However we loose the multi-tenancy. Is there a better alternative to this?

Thank you.

[eloyd]

Once you take the user notification management outside of Nagios, (meaning, you use a distribution list to send emails) you lose the link between specific people and actions within Nagios. If I understand what you're asking about, then there is no way to do what you want without making use of custom programming and the Nagios API tools to resend email notifications back to the distribution list.

Your work around is actually a pretty good once, since Nagios doesn't know who did what within its interface compared to the DL.

One option would be to set everyone's email address to the DL within Nagios, and then just use normal user management and have people do things normally. That way, all notifications would be sent back to the DL regardless of who actually initiated the action.

[cdienger]

@vazudevan, does @eloyd's suggestion help you?

[vazudevan]

@eloyd Thank you for the suggestion and feedback.

Marking DL as email ID for each user, might result in all users receiving multiple alerts for each state change. Currently the DL is an (inactive Nagios user + active contact), and actual humans users are Nagios user (without a core contact). The notification and alerts are working as expected.

The only caveat is we need to give view access to all objects and thereby losing multi-tenantany that was inherently present otherwise.

In the generic setup, If there was a way to avoid notifications from being sent to all contacts of an object, when one user from the contact group disables notification would have been ideal for our scenario.

[cdienger]

Let me know if I'm misunderstanding something but you stated that when a user disables notification that notification is only disabled for that user, which shouldn't be. When a user disables notification it should either run a command to disable notification for the host or service - effectively turning notification off for all contacts of that host or service. The specific commands that are run are:

https://old.nagios.org/developerinfo/ex ... mand_id=16
https://old.nagios.org/developerinfo/ex ... mand_id=12

Please let us know if you have any questions or if I have misinterpreted anything.

[vazudevan]

@cdienger, Thats right. what you mentioned was how I thought would work. However, from what I observed in my setup is; When a user disables notification from his/her XI login (status page), It gets disabled only for that particular user and not for everyone associated with the service / host object.

[cdienger]

Run the following just prior to disable the notifications:

tail -f /usr/local/nagiosxi/var/cmdsubsys.log

When the link is clicked, you should see either a command to disable service or host notifications. Let me know if this doesn't come up or if there are any errors or warnings logged. Please also PM me a profile so that I may check some additional logs on the system(Admin > System Config > System Profile > Download System Profile).

[vazudevan]

Thank you. I will check this out and get back to you. It might take a while for be to get back as my current focus in on a different subject. Please keep this thread open.

[tmcdonald]

We will keep this open for you. Please let us know the outcome.

[vazudevan]

Hi, I did check based on your suggestions and it is working as expected. I am not sure, what was wrong with my earlier setup. Anyways now that it is working, we are good to close this.