I'm having difficulty finding good documentation for wildcards and regular expressions (particularly as they work with exclusions) in Nagios. Here is an example of what I'm trying to do:
In nagios.cfg, the following are set, supposedly enabling * and ? as wildcards:
use_regexp_matching=1
use_true_regexp_matching=0
In services.cfg, we have a service that we would like to apply to all but a few objects; that is all Linux hosts, but not load balancers. Explicit exclusion works:
define service {
use generic-service
service_description Puppet check
hostgroup_name prod, staging, !prod-site_a-lbs
check_command check_puppet_alive_nrpe
}
But, we have many sites, each with load balancers in their own hostgroups (so notifications can be easily managed by site). Rather than having a long list of !prod-site_a-lbs, !staging-site_a-lbs, !prod-site_b-lbs. I'd hoped to be able to modify the hostgroup_name line to:
hostgroup_name prod, staging, !*-lbs
I have tried this, and while we don't get an error, this service check is still being applied to our load balancers. To double check, I have also tried:
hostgroup_name prod, staging, !.*-lbs
But, this fails, as expected (since use_true_regexp_matching is not set), when running checkconfig-noprecache:
Error: Could not find any hostgroup matching '!.*lbs' ...
In testing, .* is accepted by checkconfig-noprecache if ! is removed.
Is what we're trying possible? Can we use wildcards to exclude matching hostgroups? Or, is there an alternative that would be just as clean?
Update (2015-09-21): After testing Keith's answer, this configuration is working:
In services.cfg:
define service {
use generic-service
service_description Puppet check
hostgroup_name prod, staging, !lbs
check_command check_puppet_alive_nrpe
}
And in hostgroups.cfg, I have defined a new hostgroup using a regular expression in the 'members' directive:
define hostgroup {
hostgroup_name lbs
alias Load Balancers
members ^lb.*
}
