Etsy has a great presentation how to improve and extend Nagios functionality by adding configuration automation and reminders to the team:
http://www.slideshare.net/lozzd/leveling-up-monitoring-a-decade-of-automating-and-scaling-nagios
- Automate Nagios configuration using a CM tool like Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, Ansible etc.
- Use Jenkins to test configuration before applying on production Nagios using Etsy’s Trylib.
- Update Nagios email alerts to look better:
- Create graphs of Nagios checks performance
- Notify all operations team about service or host acknowledgement via chat message and by who
- Acknowledgements and downtimes:
- Auto expire after a predefined time
- Remind the user that set the acknowledge or downtime that it will expire via email message.