Nagios, well-known monitoring framework, allows to make compact definitions of all the entities it uses to schedule resources monitoring. There are several good tutorials on configuring Nagios, but the main principle remains the same: use hierarchical files structure, to keep all related files in a treelike structure, thus allowing to find/group those data easily.
Note that there are several configuration utils, such as Ignoramus, Centeon, Lilac and so on; basically, they solve the mentioned above problem of building file structure that can be easily traversed and parsed. To learn more about Nagios monitoring configuration, it is advised to use some of these tools and study the produced configuration files, for more hints on how this should be done.
Related terms:
Nagiosgraph
Nagios plugins
Nagios scripts
