January 2007 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

Importance flag on alerts
by Jason.Chambers＠geosoft.com 22 Jan '07

22 Jan '07

Hi Henrik, My network admin was wondering if there was a way to set the high importance flag on the emails that are sent out by certain servers. It'll have his smartphone chime a different sound if the message is marked as high importance than regular mail. No big deal if it can't be done easily. Jason Chambers IT Helpdesk Support Geosoft Inc. 85 Richmond St. West - 8th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5H 2C9 Tel: 416-369-0111 x344 Fax: 416-369-9599 www.geosoft.com

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[hobbit] Dependency sytem in Hobbit
by emarganne＠be.tiauto.com 22 Jan '07

22 Jan '07

Hello all, After another deep look into Hobbit mechanisms, it looks like the idea of using the combo tests to create a tree structure is good and you can link that structure to the alerts. This is done by putting rules that are based upon combo tests since they are considered as standard tests (with an historic, statistics ...). Now the idea would to stop the alert floods triggered when a critical device on a path falls down. The tree structure helps gathering all the necessary informations into one test. We can now trigger alerts on those alerts preferably than on common bb-hosts tests, but the flood still remains. It remains because you have to trigger alerts on each combo tests to know exactly where it has failed. And since all your combo tests are involved whenever a failure occurs at some point the following nodes will be unreachable in this case: A - 1 - 2 - 3 - F If anybody has an idea he is welcome ... :-) Etienne Marganne, TI Automotive. _____ From: Jones, Jason (Altrincham) [mailto:JasonAS_Jones at mentor.com] Sent: vendredi 19 janvier 2007 17:10 To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: RE: [hobbit] Dependency sytem in Hobbit Ok, have just read this E-mail but I thought that if you did the route tag on a host it only went yellow (unreachable by proxy) if itself and a device in it's route entry failed (i.e. if the gateway fails but the host still responds to ping then it stays green) though Henrik would have to confirm this as I haven't had such a situation. Also I'm curious how the CPU, hard drive etc, dependencies would work? If CPU on host1 has a high load what effect would that have on host2? Unless of course a database was being hosted by host1... Also can I ask, how large is this network? Henrik's is ~4000 or something ours is about 400-500. Jason. _____ From: Hubbard, Greg L [mailto:greg.hubbard at eds.com] Sent: 19 January 2007 14:56 To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: RE: [hobbit] Dependency sytem in Hobbit Etienne -- you are going to have to find someone to write that and add it to Hobbit. Path-based alarm suppression is one of the holy grails in the network management industry, and the reason it has not yet been solved is because it is a difficult problem. For small networks you can come up with a solution, but if you are using VLANs and WAN's and load balancers and all that other stuff it gets to be rather difficult. There are many commercial software vendors that claim to have this problem solved -- but sometimes even their demos do not work. The little bit of dependency specification that you can put into Hobbit does indeed work, but not across the board. GLH _____ From: Marganne, Etienne [mailto:emarganne at be.tiauto.com] Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 5:58 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Cc: henrik at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] Dependency sytem in Hobbit Hello all, I am Etienne Marganne, a new comer in TI Automotive, a society which uses Hobbit as a monitoring tool, I will be in charge of Hobbit tool. We would like to enhance our monitoring tool in order to get more detailed informations through it. One of the first thing we would like to do is to create a dependency system between monitored hosts across our network. For all the further discussion, please keep in mind that we have a very large network and two Hobbit servers where we would like to keep the same "hh-hosts" file. The idea of the dependency system is the following one: once we have a host that fails on a network path in our network all the hosts further that one will be very likely unreachable. This will cause a lot of alerts to be triggered because of one failure. This is not interesting because our team will be flooded by those alerts. Therefore it could be useful to create dependencies so that those further devices on the same path will not trigger alerts (basically turning red). There is a specific tag that can be used to do such a work, the "route" tag. In our case with two Hobbit servers, we would tune that with the "route_BBLOCATION" tag. Knowing that there are Hobbit clients on all the network nodes between the two endpoints, the simplest idea would be to list all the nodes in the description of those tags. This could work even if it would generate of job. A little bit further here, let's say that one node fails on a path, it is very probable that if you know that the following nodes are unreachable, you may not want to test them anymore (to forbid them to turn red). Now think of a big network with a lot of redundancy, it is very probable that there will be indeed a lot of network paths between a server and one final host. If on one path one node fails, it does not mean that the final client is not reachable. But with the "route" tag, that client would be signal as unreachable since a member of the "route" has failed. This is not comfortable at all. What we would like to know, or to get, if there is a way to get this dependency system work: Hobbit Server A ---- 1 ---- 2 ---- 3 ---- 4 ---- Final Client | | | --------- 5 ------------6 ----------- | There are two paths to reach the Final Client, one composed by 1, 2, 3, 4 and another one composed by 5, 6. With the current "route" tag we would have such a list of nodes: route_HobbitServerA:1,2,3,4,5,6 then if 1 fails and the path 1-2-3-4 would not work anymore but the 5-6 one would still. A good dependency system would to have such a thing: Final Client depends on 4, 4 depends on 3, 3 depends on 2, 2 depends on 1 but Final Clients also depends on 6 which depends on 5. More over this would also solve that kind of topology : Hobbit Server A ---- 1 ---- 2 ---- 3 ---- 4 ---- Final Client | | | | --------- 5 ------------6 ----------- | Where there is a link between 2 and 5, 2 and 6, 5 and 3, 6 and 3. Maybe that something could be set up with the "depends" tag, however I do not know how the informations will propagate through the different dependencies done that tag. Even further on the topic, the "route" tag performs only ping tests which does not seem enough to me. I would like to add cpu, disks, ... tests to the whole dependency system. Thank you for your help and answers, Regards, Etienne Marganne TI Automotive. The information contained in this transmission may contain privileged and confidential information. It is intended only for the use of the person(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or duplication of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. The information contained in this transmission may contain privileged and confidential information. It is intended only for the use of the person(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or duplication of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

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start up script for automatic loading
by don.munyak＠gmail.com 20 Jan '07

20 Jan '07

Hello, I'd like to automate startup of hobbit at boot time. If I make a link from /usr/local/etc/rc.d/hobbit.sh to the startup script in /usr/local/...hobbit/server/hobbit.sh, how do I get it to start using the user account 'hobbit' ? Is there another preferred technic ? Thanks

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Custom SMS Alert
by rleon＠racenter.com 19 Jan '07

19 Jan '07

How can I change my SMS alert to display just the top line of the regular email alert. For example I just want this to be sent via sms: yellow Fri Jan 19 12:48:14 CST 2007 - Filesystems NOT ok &yellow /f01 (83% used) has reached the WARNING level (83%) The end goal is to customize the alert to only send. - Filesystems NOT ok &yellow /f01 (83% used)

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Errors with btest
by mprice＠hst.nasa.gov 19 Jan '07

19 Jan '07

hello, Some times I have hosts that will go off line and the "conn" connection goes red because they can not be pinged. Which is ok, and perfectly make sense. Well, the side affect is that the "bbtest" goes yellow from timeouts of the pings timed out. Here are the errors... Error output: Timeout waiting for data from child, killing it Timeout waiting for data from child, killing it Child process terminated with signal 15 How can I prevent the "bbtest" from reacting this way.. thanks, michael -- Michael A. Price Performance Network Engineering NASA/GSFC Code 440.8/LMB Greenbelt, Maryland 20770 Phone: 240-684-1356 Cell: 410-507-7476 e-mail: mprice at hst.nasa.gov ----------------------------------------------

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[hobbit] Dependency sytem in Hobbit
by emarganne＠be.tiauto.com 19 Jan '07

19 Jan '07

Hello, Well yes indeed it could work well even though all the work necessary to build the right configuration file will be huge for a network such as ours. The idea, to explain everybody in the mailing list, would be to link the different devices together by the means of the combo test. They work as follow : BigTest1 = hostA.test && hostB.test BigTest2 = hostC.test || hostD.test BigTest3 = BigTest1 || BigTest2 To propagate correctly the informations through a network path, do as follow: A - 1 - 2 - 3 - F 1' = A (to remember the test done on A) 2' = 1' and 1 (if you want to join 2 you must at least having 1', A let's say and 1) 3' = 2' and 2 (same idea for 3) F' = 3' and 3 Another kind of topology: /- 1 -\ A /-- 2 -- F \-- 3 -/ 1' = A (useful to propagate surely the information) 2' = A 3' = A F = (1' and 1) || (2' and 2) || (3' and 3) Last kind of topology (full mesh): /- 1 -\ / | \ A /--- 2 -- F \ | / \-- 3 -/ 1' = A (useful to propagate surely the information) 2' = A 3' = A F = A and (1 || 2 || 3) Here it is. If you think about network topology I forgot, feel free to tell them (with the solution if available ;-)). Of course this does not solve directly the alerts flood problem. I will try to find out what could be possible with alerts based on the combo tests and no more on simple tests. If this solution can look pretty, at least to me, at the first read you have to remember that it is still a lot work, even with scripts doing (you have to write the scripts do not you ?). For the people with two ore more Hobbit servers, this is even worse because the views are most likely not the same. Thanks for reading and taking part, Etienne Marganne, TI Automotive -----Original Message----- From: Charles Goyard [mailto:cgoyard at cvf.fr] Sent: vendredi 19 janvier 2007 14:28 To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Dependency sytem in Hobbit Hi, try the bbcombotest to add HA logic and make the depend tag point to the aggregated dot. See bbcombotest.cfg -- Charles Goyard - cgoyard at cvf.fr - (+33) 1 45 38 01 31 To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk The information contained in this transmission may contain privileged and confidential information. It is intended only for the use of the person(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or duplication of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

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No commercial Hobbit support from me
by henrik＠hswn.dk 19 Jan '07

19 Jan '07

Some time ago I floated the idea of providing commercial support for Hobbit, and asked if anyone would be interested. A handful of you came forward and said you would be interested. However, the past few months have made it clear to me that committing myself to support Hobbit with guaranteed responsetimes etc. will not be possible. When there's a quiet period at my full-time job I'd have plenty of time to support Hobbit, but when the workload is the way it's been these past few months I would not be able to provide a reasonable level of support. And I don't want to do something poorly - then I'd rather not do it at all. So - commercial support from me won't happen at the moment. If anybody else would like to offer it, then I would very much encourage it. Regards, Henrik

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How to add custom service?
by martin.lyberg＠gmail.com 19 Jan '07

19 Jan '07

Hi, Is it possible to add custom services within hobbitmon? I want to check that certain processes are running like Mailscanner, Postgrey etc. Is there any example available to set this up? Thank you. / Martin

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How to define yellow AND red for a process count
by grsamy＠yahoo.com 19 Jan '07

19 Jan '07

How to define yellow and red for a process count? For example: http 0 = red http 1 to 15 = yellow http >15 red I think it is possible in BB by : hostname:http;<=15:http;>15 Thanks Ram ____________________________________________________________________________________ Now that's room service! Choose from over 150,000 hotels in 45,000 destinations on Yahoo! Travel to find your fit. http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097

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Snapshot gives empty Status pages
by lars.ebeling＠leopg9.no-ip.org 19 Jan '07

19 Jan '07

It has been like this for a long time. Regards Lars Ebeling http://leopg9.no-ip.org Hobbithobbyist "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." -- Mark Twain

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