Writing custom Nagios Core management scripts

As established in Chapter 7, Using the Web Interface, some control over the Nagios Core process can be achieved by different areas of a web interface by enabling or disabling notifications or checks, scheduling downtime for hosts or services, or acknowledging existing programs. However, for large networks in particular, we may often need a more flexible approach to run operations on a large number of hosts or services in batches or to disable or enable features from another script, which is cumbersome to manage via the CGI.

For example, if we had a list of more than a hundred hosts in a segment of our network that were going to become inaccessible due to scheduled maintenance at a known time, it would take a very long time for us to set up all the scheduled downtime in the web interface to avoid sending out notifications for those hosts. It would be better to do this via a command line.

In this recipe, we'll install a custom script in /usr...