Recently I visited one of our Austrian customers in the city of Schwaz. Tyrolit, part of the Swarovski Group and one of the world’s leading suppliers of abrasives, are based there.
In common with most large companies their IT department needs to respond 24×7 to any serious problems, and they have a weekly on-call rota for the system administrators.
As always with Nagios, there is more than one way to solve this – one of the most popular being to send all alerts to a single email address and/or ‘phone number which is passed to whomever has the rota. It’s a simple and fairly easy way to manage the problem, especially if you use one of the managed group-call-number services available on the market (e.g. Vodafone CorporateVPN). One of the biggest disadvantages however is that you can no longer find out who received the alert. Plus you are adding another point-of-failure into the notification chain.
For some customers I would recommend handing all notifications to an external handler (e.g. NoMa), which offers a simple configuration GUI; but it wasn’t suitable in this case – so we decided to send the alerts to a Nagios contact group and built a small webpage to manage this group and create Nagios configuration files. With a couple of mouse clicks the Admin-on-Call can be changed.
This is one of the strengths of Nagios. The ability to easily expand the functionality with a script if need be. Which reminds me: I must upload it to www.NagiosExchange.org …
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