Often, when deciding how to arrange things, it may make sense to have something in more than one place. You may have a group of "Unix Servers" containing all of your unix servers, and also a group "Web Servers" containing all of your web servers. While you could just monitor the service twice, that just seems silly.
An Alias acts much like a "symlink", allowing the same object to appear in more than one place, but still only be monitored once.
Group "Web Servers" { Alias "threemile" "Top:Unix_Servers:threemile" Alias "tarawa" "Top:NT_Servers:tarawa" Alias "matagi" "Top:NT_Servers:matagi" }
Sometimes you want to monitor 2 similar things, but with some minor difference. The way argus tells things apart is by is name. If the name argus wants to use is the same for both items, argus will complain. You can specify this name yourself, if you need to:
Host "jeremy-03.example.com" { Service TCP/HTTP { uname: HTTP-PRIMARY } Service TCP/HTTP { port: 8080 uname: HTTP-SECONDARY } }
Without the uname specified, argus will not be able to tell these items apart (both would have the name HTTP_jeremy-03.example.com.