You should have a working Nagios Core 3.0 or better server running.

We can set up our new time period, which we'll call weekdays, as follows:

In our host and service definitions, there are two directives, check_period and notification_period. These directives are used to define the times during which a host or service should be checked, and the times when notifications about them should be sent. The 24x7 and workhours periods are defined in the timeperiods.cfg file that we just edited, and are used in several of the examples and templates.

We've just added two more of these time periods, which we can now use in our definitions for hosts and services. The first is called weekdays, and corresponds to any time during a weekday; the second is called weekends, and corresponds to any time that's not a weekday. Note that in both cases, we specified the dates and times by naming each individual day, and the times to which they corresponded.

The definitions for dates are quite clever, and can be defined in a variety of ways. The following are all valid definitions for days and time periods:

It's likely that the standard 24x7 and workhours definitions will be fine for day-to-day monitoring, maybe with a weekdays and weekends definition added. However, there may well come a time when we need a specific host or service monitored on an unusual schedule, particularly if we're debugging a specific problem that only manifests around a certain time, or have a lot of contacts to manage, or a complex on-call roster.

Note that Nagios Core can behave in unusual ways, particularly with uptime reporting, if the time periods for our monitoring of hosts and services don't add up to 24 hours. Ideally, we should check and notify all our hosts and services in at least some way around the clock, but dealing with the notifications in different ways depending on schedule; for example, we could page the systems administrators about a non-critical system during work hours, but just e-mail them when they're asleep!