Warn certain users about host down, but not service states

Question

My boss is starting to complain that he gets too many emails from my icinga/nagios instance and so am i to be honest, and he doesn't need to know everything, neither does development.

So what i want to do, is to limit the amount of email is sent out.

I started by removing contact_groups from hosts, and instead apply these to individual services that they care about, all well and good.

But, for certain hosts i would like notifications be sent out on a host down, but not services defined. How would i go on about doing that?

TLDR: how to make nagios email user about host down, but not services on that host

Answer 1

For these users who don't need all of the details, look at service_notifications_enabled as the contact config option. This will only give them host notifications. You can do ALL kinds of things to fine tune your notifications with Nagios, so don't waste them if people don't need to get them, otherwise they'll just get filtered into a mailbox that no one ever reads.

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/objectdefinitions.html#contact