title: Does Nagios have an API that can control targets?
body: <p>In Zabbix, there is a well documented (although in Draft status) <a href="http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/1.8/api/objects/host" rel="nofollow noreferrer">API</a> for instantiating targets and controlling them.  Does such an API exist in Nagios?  </p>
  
  <p>The need for this is a cloud-based implementation.  I would like to be able to scale monitoring targets dynamically so that on Monday it would be monitoring 10 targets and Tuesday it would be monitoring 15 and down to 8 on Wednesday.  </p>
  
  <p>The best way I can figure to do this is to control targets in a programmatic fashion since auto-discovery will probably fail as the nodes are not in the same subnet.  Any ideas on how to do this with Nagios?</p>