One of my personal missions within Kumina is to decrease the amount of noise. We work fairly event-driven, responding to everything that gets reported. Although I believe our customers like this very much, it can be a bit of a bother in the case where someone is not on helpdesk duty. One of my pet peeves was the fact that Nagios sent SMS alerts to everyone, instead of the person who was on duty at the time.
Since we have multiple Nagios instances, it would be a bit of a hassle to change the config everywhere all the time, so we stuck with the current way. At least you can be sure that someone received the message. But since we get some false positives too, at time, it does add to the bill.
So I decided to create Kumishifts. This little Python script takes a Google Calendar (or any ical you point it at) and distills who’s on duty. It generated a Nagios contacts file based on that information (and then some). We can now actually work with escalations to make sure that if the first person responsible doesn’t respond fast enough (bad person!), a second one will get the message after a little while, too.
We’re not yet deploying the script everywhere, but will soon, after it’s properly tested. I’d appreciated any feedback on the app!