We already know how notifications work in Nagios. The previous chapters described how Nagios sends information to the users when a problem occurs, and how it decides to notify people. Previously, our examples were limited to sending an email 24 hours a day or only during working days.

There is a lot more to what Nagios can do, and how it can make your life easier. Imagine that you set up Nagios to send a text message to your mobile during day time. It can also send you a message on Jabber or MSN. Imagine that you also make Nagios stop notifying you when your workstation is not online.

Even though the above examples above seem complicated, they are actually quite simple to implement. It's a matter of combining event handlers with custom variables, and a little ingenuity. A service that will check if a user's workstation is present can have an event handler to automatically enable and disable host and/or service notifications for a contact or contact group...