Nagios xi - Groups

Overview

This guide on Best Practices is about host and contact groups and what you should take into consideration when designing your monitoring deployment.

Use Hostgroups

Using hostgroups in your service definitions is one of the most powerful features of Nagios.

Common services generally have the same threshold for all hosts. Instead creating individual services for each host you monitor, a service can be assigned to multiple hosts using a hostgroup. What this means is that you only need to have the service defined once, and when you want to tweak the thresholds, you only need to change it in one location and all hosts will receive the updated thresholds.

If you have a host group called windows_servers, whenever you add a new windows server it’s just a matter of adding that server to the hostgroup and that host gets that bunch of common checks. This is great for consistent monitoring, it ensures standards get applied and reduces management overhead.

To create host groups, see Using CCM for Host Management. To create service groups, see Using CCM for Service Management.

Use Contactgroups

One of the most common support questions we get asked is how to add or remove a contact to or from a bunch of objects? If you don’t have the enterprise edition license then you don’t get access to the bulk modification tool that allows you to do this.

However just changing just the contacts can lead to human error. It’s very easy to make mistakes and before you know it a notification was not sent to the correct people.

Using a contact group is a much better method. It’s so much easier to go in and add or remove a contact from a contactgroup and instantly all the objects that use this group will be updated. Even if there is only one member to a contact group it still makes administration so much easier.

If you’ve not activated the trial of enterprise edition, this is a great way make use of the bulk modification tool to implement contactgroups and remove the individual contacts. Once your standard is in place, administration will be so much easier.

To create contact groups, see Understanding Multi-Tenancy.

Final Thoughts

For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at:

http://support.nagios.com/forum/