Categories and severities

Categories allow you to:

• organise hosts or services to define user permissions on them using ACLs
• Filtering the view on the Resources Status page.

A special type of category is called a severity. Severities can be used to achieve all of the above, but also to

• sort the view on the Resource Status page by severity, e.g. to show the most important alerts first. (Severity levels are displayed in the S column on the Resource Status page).

• Filter data in the Host Monitoring and Service Monitoring widgets in Custom Views.

Hosts category

Go to the Configuration > Hosts > Categories menu and click on Add.

• The Host Category Name and Alias fields contain the name and alias of the host category respectively.
• The Linked Hosts list allows us to add hosts to the category.
• If a host template is added to the Linked Host Template list, all hosts that inherit from that template are listed as belonging to that category.
• The Severity type field indicates that the category of hosts has a level of severity.
• The Level and Icon fields define a criticality level and associated icon respectively.
• The Status and Comment fields allow us to enable or disable the host category and to comment on it.

Services category

Go to the Configuration > Services > Categories menu and click on Add.

• The Name and Description fields define the name and description of the service category.
• When a service template is added to the Service Template Descriptions, all services that inherit from that template are listed as belonging to that category.
• The Severity field indicates that the service category has a criticality level.
• The Level and Icon fields define a criticality level and associated icon respectively.
• The Status field allows us to activate or deactivate the service category.

Severities

Creating a severity

To create a severity:

1. Go to Configuration > Hosts > Categories or Configuration > Services > Categories and click Add.
2. Fill in the Name and Alias fields, then select Severity Type.
3. Define a severity level (a number used to sort hosts or services in the Resource Status page) and an icon to appear in the S column of the Resource Status page.
4. Click on Save. The severity will appear in the severity list.

Applying the severity to a host or service

1. Edit the host or service (go to Configuration > Hosts > Hosts or Configuration > Services > Services by Host and then click on the host or service).
2. In the Extended Info tab, in the Monitoring Engine section, select the required severity from the Severity Level list.
3. Click on Save.
4. Deploy the configuration file. On the Resource Status page, the severity icon will appear in the S column. A tooltip displays the level and name of the severity. Clicking the column header will sort the view by severity level.