Nagios Support Forum

Hello,

Is it possible to set a service as the parent of a host?

We monitor remote sites with our Nagios installation and sometimes experience packet loss which affects Nagios talking to the hosts. Although this is unacceptable we're working on resolving the problem with the Internet connections.

In the mean time I'd like to try and setup the above service/host parenting so that if the connection quality drops, we don't get alerted for every host 'being down'.

You could set up monitoring of the gateway host between your nagios box and the network segment it is monitoring. Make the gateway the parent of all the hosts on the network segment, so when the connection to the gateway drops, you only receive notifications that the gateway is down.

Alternatively, if the outages are short, you could increase the number of retries or set up a delay on first notification in a service escalation definition.

Hello

Thanks for the reply. I've done just that already. The outer most host of any site is the ISP router, this is the parent to our local firewall(s). The firewall(s) are the parent of the network switches, which are the parents of the servers etc etc.

I'd rather not set a delay on the notification because of the obvious side affects it will have delaying notifications.

I guess I could setup some service dependencies and see if they will do what I need. I've not looked into them in enough detail yet.

If you have the parent/child relationships set up, (sounds like you do) service dependencies and escalations are next. If your choices are between false critical notifications and a slight notification delay for certain network segments, I would go with they delay personally.

Seems like you have a good handle on it, cheers.