Hi mplatt,

When you talk about a service group, do you mean a set of services named CPU?

Centreon has the notion of service status state. This soft or hard state allows you to adjust the granularity of monitoring. A certain number of times the service must be in the CRITICAL state for the service status to be validated (HARD state).

In the service configuration, you have two levers to adjust the time before the service status is validated as CRITICAL:

1. The number of the verification command is executed.
2. The interval between each execution of the command (when there is a state change).

With these two values, you have the possibility to increase the time before receiving a notification (which appears when the service is in a HARD state).

You can find more information in the official documentation, which provides a visual and very informative example of these options.

https://docs.centreon.com/docs/alerts-notifications/notif-concept/

Please note that the visual example is only available in an older version of the documentation: https://docs.centreon.com/docs/20.04/alerts-notifications/concepts/

At our place, we use the following default configuration: we execute checks every 5 minutes, and as soon as a command is critical, the next execution is closer (2 minutes after). And the service must be validated at least three times before sending a notification. This means that we have 5 minutes + 2 minutes + 2 minutes = 9 minutes (in the worst case) before receiving a notification.