Creating a new contactgroup

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         [email protected]
}
define contact {
    use           generic-contact
    contact_name  jane
    alias         Jane Doe
    email         [email protected]
}

We can create our new ops contactgroup as follows:

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.

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.