My first impression is that your entire developer team is mis-using OO. Nagios doesn't have classes - it has parameters. There are no behaviors associated with that data, other than getters and setters. So, maybe you should have a single class that actually composes the data structure (presumably a hash) from other data structures.

As for general design ideas ... it's usually better to start with more specific and generalize later. There are several reasons for this:

• You usually will not have enough understanding of the problemspace until you try it a few times
• You may never need all the generalization, so why waste time building it?
• It's better to have something running now, even if it's not perfect, than to have something perfect that doesn't run until later. You can always improve it later, if you need to.

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