Nagios Support Forum

Is there an easy way to make sure I do not receive service alarms when a host is down?

You can click the hostname then click "Acknowledge this problem" in the right hand toolbar or schedule downtime?

Let me elaborate - I know I can acknowledge or disable an alert. My goal is to avoid a storm of alerts when an actual issue is occurring.
Example: Server A goes down and I get an alert for Server A. I then get an alert for Server A - CPU, Server A - Disk space, Server A antivirus service stopped, etc. Can the service alerts automatically be disabled when the host is down?

In the event of some kind of unexpected catastrophe that is causing an alert storm you can go to the 'Process Information' page and click 'disable notifications' until order has been restored.

If we are talking about preventing broadcast storms in the first place with proper use of parenting, dependencies and inheritance that's a more in-depth topic. First thing you should do is assume Nagios is the center of your networks universe and begin defining the parent directive on each of your hosts, where the parent is defined as the next closest device to Nagios. If a service is assigned to a host and the host goes down, Nagios is smart enough to not alert for those services... however the host has to go into a down state (even if it's just a soft state) before the service does. This means your host checks should either be equally frequent or more frequent than your service checks.

If you have a service that is dependent on another host... set up a ping service on the host it is dependent on, then use a service dependency definition to prevent alerts if it is down.