Relationships between users and contacts

Users and contacts have relationships and differences as follows:

Users correspond to user accounts that are used to login to the web interface. A user is typically “connected” to a contact for the purposes of both enabling notifications and obtaining permission to see and modify hosts and services.
Contacts are definitions that are normally used for directing host and service alerts to specific individuals. While contacts are not required to have a relationship with a user, they typically do have have a relationship with a user. This ensures that the user can use the web interface.

In normal operation, users are directly associated to contacts with a one-to-one relationship. Admins create this relationship when they check the Create as Monitoring Contact option when adding new user accounts. This direct correlation allows the management of alert notifications from the monitoring engine on a per-user basis. Users can easily manage their notification preferences and methods using the web interface without having to understand the complexities of the underlying contact definitions. When a user account is directly related to a contact, the user account is automatically granted permission to see and modify all hosts and services the underlying contact receives notifications for.

By default users are allowed to manage their notification preferences, notification times, and notification messages through the web interface. This requires that each user has a direct relationship with a corresponding contact. The relationship between a user and a contact is established with the following configuration:

There is a contact with the same short name (e.g. jdoe) as the user's username (e.g. jdoe).
The contact that corresponds to the user account must have the following properties:
- Host notification command is xi_host_notification_handler
- Service notification command is xi_service_notification_handler
- Host and service notification time periods are both set to <username>_notification_times (e.g. jdoe_notification_times)

To define a relationship between a pre-existing contact and a new user, modify the contact's configuration information using the Core Configuration Manager. This is useful when constructing relationships after migrating. If you wish to break an existing user/contact relationship, change the contact's configuration details to use values other than those described above.