Using inheritance and templates
In order to allow flexible configuration of machines, Nagios offers a powerful inheritance functionality. The main concept is that administrators can set up templates that define common parameters and reuse them in actual host or service definitions. The mechanism even offers the possibility to create templates that inherit parameters from other templates.
Templates are regular Nagios objects that have the register directive and set it to 0. This means that they will not be registered as an actual host or service that needs to be monitored. Objects that inherit parameters from a template or another host should have a use directive pointing to the short name of the template object they are using.
When defining a template, its name is always specified using the name directive. This is slightly different from how typical hosts and services are registered, as they require the host_name and/or service_description parameters.
Inheritance can be used to define a template...
