Introduction

Notifications in Nagios Core refer to the events fired and the messages generated when hosts or services change state, for the purposes of informing appropriate people or systems.

For example, when connectivity to a host is lost, it leaves the UP state and goes to the DOWN state on the next check. This eventually generates a notification event, and provided the appropriate flags are set and a contact is available, a message about the state change is generated and dealt with in some way as defined in the configuration.

The default text for such notifications goes into some detail about the problem, including the output from the appropriate plugin command:

***** Nagios *****
Notification Type: PROBLEM
Host: sparta.naginet
State: DOWN
Address: 10.128.0.21
Info: CRITICAL - Host Unreachable (10.128.0.21)
Date/Time: Sat May 19 16:27:39 NZST 2012

So, with this kind of text generated as a result of the event, the next question is what Nagios Core should do with it. A common method of...