GroundWork alert notifications can be configured using Nagios or NoMa. The Nagios method will only notify on Nagios configured elements, and NoMa will notify on both Nagios and other configured monitors (e.g., Cloud Hub, GDMA). Please see Notifications and Downtime for a descriptive overview of these methods.

Configuring notifications using Nagios

Host groups and service groups

A Host Group definition is used to group one or more hosts together for the purposes of simplifying notifications. When a host goes down, becomes unreachable, or recovers, Nagios will find which host group(s) the host is a member of, get the contact group for each of those host groups, and notify all Contacts associated with those contact groups. Host groups allow for flexibility in determining who gets paged for what kind of problems. Each host that you define must be a member of at least one host group - even if it is the only host in that group. Hosts can be in more than one host group.
See How to configure host groups.

Service Groups allow for flexibility in determining who gets paged for what kind of problems. Service groups allow you to group services together for display purposes in the CGIs and can be referenced in service dependency and service escalation definitions to make configuration a bit easier. This section will take you through the steps to create a new service group. The prerequisites for service groups are defined hosts with services and services assigned to hosts.
See How to configure service groups.

Contact templates, contacts, and contact groups

Next, in our setup of notifications and escalations, we'll work with the Contact Template definition directives. A contact template consists of host and service notification time periods, specific host and service notification options (states for which notifications can be sent out), and host and service notification commands used to notify of a host or service problem or recovery. These templates aid in creating contacts by conveniently applying commonly used directives.

After you have completed defining contact templates, continue with creating contacts. Contact directives consist of contact properties: name, alias, email, pager, and a required contact template. Individual template directives can be selected for the contact definition, or the applied contact template's properties can be inherited.

Next, a Contact Group is a grouping of contacts. A contact group's directives consist of name, alias, and the selected contacts. After creating contact groups, you will be ready to associate these groups with host and service templates, hosts, services, and host groups definitions.
See How to configure Nagios contacts.

Defining escalation trees

Escalation Trees are groupings of multiple host or service escalation definitions that can be assigned to a host, host profile, host group, or a service. Notifications and escalations are how the GroundWork Monitor's Nagios engine alerts its users when monitoring services change between states (OK, WARNING, CRITICAL, and UNKNOWN). Escalations combine specified contact groups that are to be notified when a notification is escalated. An escalation tree is a grouping of multiple escalations which are then assigned to a host, host profile, host group, or a service. Escalations are optional. Below, we cover creating escalations and then configuring escalation trees.
See How to configure Nagios escalations.

Enabling and receiving Nagios notification

Notifications for Nagios monitoring are set to OFF system-wide by default. This means that host and service notifications will not be sent out. After enabling notifications, host and service notifications will be sent to any valid system contacts. In addition to the system-wide default setting for notifications, the Enable Notifications option can be set for all hosts and services assigned to a specific template by setting this option in a host or service template. Also, the Enable Notifications option can be set for individual host or service definitions by changing the definitions template inheritance. Below, we outline how to enable notifications. After enabling notifications, continue setting up system notifications and escalations by clicking the home icon at the top of this page and referring to links under Setting up Host and Service Notifications.

Enable system wide notifications

Select Configuration > Nagios Monitoring > Control > Nagios main configuration, and click Notification.
Select the box next to Enable Notifications to enter a check which indicates notifications are on. At the bottom of the page, click Save and Next to save this change.
You'll need to commit this change to your Nagios configuration, select Control again.
Select Backup if necessary, and then Commit to overwrite the active Nagios configuration and restart Nagios.