One of my co-developers raised an interesting point in a mail to the dev mailing list today.

How do other monitoring toosl deal with "configuration for lots of almsot identical objects"? I mean, say you have a really big cluster of (say) linux boxes, where the only difference between them is their name?

The current noctool solution is: (cluster ("machine-%d" 1 800) (machine name linux-host ... more config here ))

This will generate 800 copies of the (machine ...) config snippet, with the name changed (if you prefer a place- holder other than "name", you can specify another one, it you want a format string suitable for CL:FORMAT, you can have that, too). However, as always, it's interesting to see how other have solved the same problem (or, indeed, not solved it, as the case might be).