Creating a new contactgroup

In this recipe, we'll create a new contactgroup into which we can add our contacts. Like hostgroups and servicegroups, contactgroups mostly amount to convenient shortcuts. In this case, it allows us to define a contactgroup as the recipient of notifications for a host or service definition. This means that we could define an ops group, for example, and then even if people joined or left the group, we wouldn't need to change any definitions for the hosts or services.

Getting ready

You should have a working Nagios Core 4.0 or better server running.

You should also have at least two contacts that form a meaningful group. In this case, we have two staff members, John Smith and Jane Doe, who are both part of our network operations team. We want them both to be notified for all the appropriate hosts and services, so we'll add them to a group called ops. Here are the definitions with which we're working:

define contact {
    use           generic-contact
    contact_name  john
    alias         John Smith
    email         [e-mail]
}
define contact {
    use           generic-contact
    contact_name  jane
    alias         Jane Doe
    email         [e-mail]
}

How to do it...

We can create our new ops contactgroup as follows:

1. Change to our Nagios Core configuration objects directory and edit the contacts.cfg file:

   # cd /usr/local/nagios/etc
   # vi contacts.cfg
   

2. Add the following definition to the file, substituting in your own values in bold as appropriate:

   define contactgroup {
       contactgroup_name  ops
       alias              Network operators
   }

3. For each of the contacts that we want to add to the group, find their definitions and add the contactgroups directive to them. The definitions will end up looking something like this:

   define contact {
       use            generic-contact
       contact_name   john
       alias          John Smith
       email          [e-mail]
       contactgroups  ops
   }
   define contact {
       use            generic-contact
       contact_name   jane
       alias          Jane Doe
       email          [e-mail]
       contactgroups  ops
   }

4. Reload the configuration:

   # /etc/init.d/nagios reload
   

How it works...

With this group set up, we are now able to use it in the contactgroups directive for hosts and services to define which contacts notifications should be sent to. Notifications are sent to all the addresses in the group. This can replace the contacts directive, where we name contacts individually.

There's more...

As an example, consider the following service definition:

define service {
    use                  generic-service
    host_name            sparta.example.net
    service_description  HTTP
    check_command        check_http
    contacts             john,jane
}

Instead of having a service definition as the preceding one, we could use this:

define service {
    use                  generic-service
    host_name            sparta.example.net
    service_description  HTTP
    check_command        check_http
    contact_groups       ops
}

If John Smith were to leave the operations team, we could simply remove his contact definition and nothing else would require changing; from then on, only Jane would receive the services notification. This method provides a layer of abstraction between contacts and the hosts and services for which they receive notifications.

See also

• The Creating a new contact section in this chapter
• Automating contact rotation, Chapter 4, Configuring Notifications
• Using inheritance to simplify a configuration, Chapter 9, Managing Configuration