Seriously, How do tools like Nagios and friends do this? I'll admit, I'm a bit out of the loop here. Most of what we do A) isn't done by me and B) is in-house stuff.
As far as I can tell, "not at all". You want two mostly-identical objects monitored, you write two mostly-identical config stanzas. You want 4000, you write a piece of code to write the configuration for you.
With the "Big Kit", you configure one instance, see what you want different from the defaults, tweak the defaults, then click "auto-discover".
Is there any sort of precedent that anyone has seen here? I love to steal other people's hard work ;)
For now, I suspect the cluster config that noctool has is "good enough" (I pushed the changes in this morning, with C-style format strings as default, the converter understands %%, %d and %0wd (where w is a decimal number) escapes, lisp-style format strings are available with a flag.
//Ingvar