Defining a custom notification method

In this recipe, we'll learn how to specify an alternative method for a contact to receive notifications about a service. A very typical method for a contact to receive notifications is by sending an e-mail to their contact address; e-mail messages could be sent to an inbox or a paging device.

However, notifications are just text; we can arrange to deal with them via any command we wish, in much the same way as we can configure host or service checks. In this recipe, we'll set up a new contact called motd, which when it receives notifications will write them into the server's /etc/motd directory to be displayed on login.

Getting ready

You should have a Nagios Core 3.0 or newer server, with at least one host or service configured already. You should understand how notifications are generated and their default behavior in being sent to the contacts and contact_groups for hosts or services.

We'll use the example of a host called troy.naginet, configured to send...