Monitoring setup guidance

[obmij]

First, this project rocks. Nagios itself was awesome enough, but Nagios + Oreon is amazing.

Anyway, my work has decided to switch from another monitoring application to Nagios. We've decided to use the Oreon frontend, as I'm a relatively skillful PHP programmer and it allows us to integrate new things into the frontend relatively easily (Host status page pulling information from our customer database, etc).

The trouble I'm running into is setting up host dependencies. We are a regional ISP and we monitor T1, ISDN, and Business DSL customers, primarily through pinging the router on the far end of the circuit, or via SNMP. I'm not entirely sure how to create the dependency tree we need via Nagios/Oreon.

I need to be able to say "All these hosts depend on (Router)", so that if (Router) goes down for maintenance or has a real problem, we get 1 alert for the router being down and not several dozen alerts for T1s being down. The only way I've seen that I can accomplish this is to put the router in a hostgroup, put all the customers on that router in a host group, and make one depend on the other. Is that the recommended way?

Thanks in advance!

[DonKiShoot]

juste declare router as parent for any child i think :wink:

[obmij]

That's what I think as well, I'm mostly asking about the how. Right now I'm looking at the options of:
A) Individually do each host's parent/child setup, which is not appealing as that will be ~450 hosts to setup, with additions and deletions weekly
Make a hostgroup for each router, and make hostgroups of all hosts that are served by that router, and then make the hostgroup have a parent of the router hostgroup.

I guess I'm looking to see if there is any way that Oreon can quickly allow me to make a hostgroup depend on a host. I may be missing the choice, but I only see the options to make a host depend on a host, or make a hostgroup depend on a hostgroup.

I think what is making this slightly more difficult as there are multiple routers (and multiple interfaces on each router). If there was just one router, I could easily depend all hosts on that one router being up, but we are an ISP with customers attached to multiple routers. I know I could easily do each customer individually (ick), or group them into hostgroups by router interface and a hostgroup of each "host" router and depend them that way (which is what I'm leaning towards), just seeing if there is any other way that would require less legwork.