[Xymon] Why IGNORE HOST and EXHOST work differently with UNMATCHED?

[Märt Laak]

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.
>
>     Is it bug or is there some explanation for this behavior?
>
>     With kindest regards,
>     Märt
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