An interesting new feature in Nagios 3 is the ability to change various parameters related to notifications. These parameters are modified via an external command pipe, similar to a few of the commands shown in the previous section.

A good example would be when Nagios contact persons have their workstations connected to the local network only when they are actually at work (which is usually the case if they are using notebooks), and turn their computers off when they leave work. In such a case, a ping check for a person's computer could trigger an event handler to toggle that person's attributes.

Let's assume that our user jdoe has two actual contacts — jdoe-email and jdoe-jabber, each for different types of notifications. We can set up a host corresponding to the jdoe workstation. We will also set it up to be monitored every five minutes and create an event handler. The handler will change the jdoe-jabber's host and service notification time period to none on a hard...