Using authenticated contacts

In this recipe, we'll learn how to use authenticated contacts to refine our control of access to information in the Nagios Core web interface. This recipe is useful in situations where a particular user requires information on the status of certain hosts and services but should not be allowed to view others, a setup which can't be managed with the directives in cgi.cfg.

As a simple example, on a given monitoring server, we might have two hosts configured thus:

define host {
    use        linux-server
    host_name  sparta.naginet
    alias      sparta
    address    10.128.0.21
    contacts   nagiosadmin
}
define host {
    use        linux-server
    host_name  athens.naginet
    alias      athens
    address    10.128.0.22
    contacts   nagiosadmin
}

We might like to add a new user athensadmin with permissions to view the status of and run commands on the athens.naginet host and its services, but not the sparta.naginet host or its services.

Getting ready

You...