Nagios Support Forum

I'm currently using Nagios XI, and I have configured three states of alerts: CRITICAL, WARNING, and OK. However, I have a specific requirement to add a custom hard state called FATAL for extreme issues, such as when the server or a specific component (in this case, a Java jar component) is down. Presently, when the host is down, I receive a "DOWN" message, and when the component is down, I receive a "URL Status is CRITICAL" notification. But I want to modify it to display "URL Status is FATAL" instead. I would like to know if it's possible to add this custom state in Nagios and how I can accomplish it.

Hello @Beemsty,

You can customize your notification output in Admin->Users->Notification Management. You can change the subject and the contents of the notification there and can use the various Nagios macros (as can be seen here: Standard Macros in Nagios).

There is no "FATAL" option, but %HOSTSTATE% will be filled by UP/DOWN/UNREACHABLE, which is what you are looking for.

The reason your notifications are showing CRITICAL instead of DOWN is because the service is in a CRITICAL state, but the the host is still up. Any host notifications will show %type% Host Alert - %host% is %hoststate% by default (i.e. ... - Nagios.com is UP), so unless it has been altered, that will be the notification received.