So you actually suggest to write two rules instead of one, like this:

HOST=somehost EXSERVICE=someservice MAIL admin at domain.com

HOST=* EXHOST=somehost MAIL admin at domain.com

IMHO this "hostrules plus catch-all rule with these hosts excepted" makes rule writing more complex and error-prone than with one catch-all rule with several IGNORE-s needed. As I said for human eye they seem equal (only catch-all rule with ignores is more readable).

But, can somebody point the use-case where this "IGNORE is not part of rule and therefore is blocking UNMATCHED to trigger" behavior is actually useful and needed? As I said, IMHO this behavior leads to unwanted non-alerting only.

Man page says about UNMATCHED:

UNMATCHED - The alert is sent to this recipient ONLY if no other recipients received an alert for this event.

No mention of IGNORE is blocking UNMATCHED. So I somehow suggest not only me was confused...

Can this behavior be considered to be changed (or configurable in xymonserver.cfg)? I volunteer to be alpha-tester...

Märt

On 3.08.2015 23:00, Mike Burger wrote:

If you want to exclude someservice on a specific host, don't you use:

HOST=somehost EXSERVICE=someservice MAIL supervisor at domain.com

On 2015-08-03 3:04 pm, Märt Laak wrote:

...

Thank you for explaining things, Jeremy!

But don't you think this behavior can easily lead to unwanted non-alerting?

And, more important, IMHO makes impossible to exclude alerts based multiple types together.

Consider if admin does not want to be alerted on somehost.someservice. How to configure that?

Fe. This does not work:

HOST=* EXHOST=somehost EXSERVICE=someservice MAIL admin at domain.com

HOST=* MAIL supervisor at domain.com UNMATCHED

Using this construction admin does not get alert on somehost.someotherservice, not to mention that all other host someservice-s are also ignored. However, supervisor gets alerted correctly.

I could rewrite this so that admin is happy:

HOST=* IGNORE HOST=somehost SERVICE=someservice MAIL admin at domain.com

HOST=* MAIL supervisor at domain.com UNMATCHED

But in this case supervisor is not happy, as he gets no alerts when nobody is alerted (as he expects by UNMATCHED) - on somehost.someservice nobody gets alerted.

So please help me how to configure alerts in this situation?

With kindest regards, Märt

On 3.08.2015 4:25, Jeremy Laidman wrote:

...

I think this can be explained from the man page:

"IGNORE - This is used to define a recipient that does NOT trigger any alerts, and also terminates the search for more recipients."

What this means is that the rule matched the host "somehost" but the alert for the recipient was suppressed. The fact that it matched means that the UNMATCHED rule will not be invoked.

By contrast, the EXHOST causes the rule to not match "somehost", hence will match the UNMATCHED rule.

I hope this explains.

Cheers Jeremy

On 31 July 2015 at 16:34, Märt Laak <mart.laak at active.ee <mailto:mart.laak at active.ee>> wrote:

Hi Henrik and others who help to develop this invaluable piece of
software, Xymon!

I've been used BB more than 15 years for now and now trying to
migrate to Xymon because it seems more flexible and powerful to me.
Now I'm in the middle of converting my existing (fairly complex)
bbwarnrules to alerts.cfg

Everything works great except some strange to me cases with

UNMATCHED.

For example, if you look at these two configurations - they seem
similar to human eye:

1: using IGNORE
---
HOST=*
   IGNORE HOST=somehost
   MAIL admin at domain.com

HOST=*
   MAIL supervisor at domain.com UNMATCHED
---

2: using EX...
---
HOST=* EXHOST=somehost
   MAIL admin at domain.com

HOST=*
   MAIL supervisor at domain.com UNMATCHED
---

However, the first (IGNORE HOST) construction does NOT send alert to
supervisor at admin.com <mailto:supervisor at admin.com> in case of
somehost alert, as expected.