Being familiar with both Netcool and Hobbit, I would never consider replacing Netcool trap management with Hobbit. Netcool processes traps in "near real time" and scales quite large. Hobbit does not provide real time monitoring (default is 5 minute samples, with 1 minute screen updates). The only scenario where Hobbit might successfully replace a Netcool system is if you only want to know that *something bad* happened in the last five minutes, and you don't mind drilling down into a Hobbit screen to find out what *something bad* is. You will have to be careful about how you construct your trap test so it will handle alarm clearing and won't forget problems.
I am not throwing any rocks at Hobbit -- it was not designed to handle real-time alarm management. I *think* Henrik would agree...
With all that said, it is pretty easy to forward Hobbit alarms to Netcool, and I don't think it would be very hard to forward Netcool alarms to a Hobbit test -- if you are concerned about a dashboard, etc.
GLH
-----Original Message----- From: Jacobs, Eric (ThomasTech) [mailto:Eric.Jacobs at thomastechsolutions.com] Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 5:05 PM To: 'hobbit at hswn.dk' Subject: RE: [hobbit] Hobbit not recognizing certain tests?
-----Original Message----- From: FARRIOR, Andy [mailto:Andy.Farrior at victoriacollege.edu] Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 5:30 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: RE: [hobbit] Hobbit not recognizing certain tests?
Andy, wonderful to hear from you. And thanks for your method of getting snmp traps into Hobbit. It is a bit of a feather in my cap that I can do so. My boss is anxious to get rid of our highly priced NetCool monitoring package, but we needed to be able to monitor traps, at least from our F5 devices.
I haven't modified trap.pl in a very *long* time. Hmm... (I'm still using it.)
Going back over the code, I'm running hobbitdboard so I can get the validtime field for the test: "$BB $BBDISP \"hobbitdboard test=trap fields=hostname,validtime,color\" "
In case there's a host that doesn't send a trap that often, I wanted to change the color to green instead of having it go purple and generate an alert. So to get the time left for a test, I needed the hobbitdboard results. A side-effect is that the column won't appear until the device sends it's first trap.
Yes, I looked again at the code and realized that I was mistaken, and have already apologized to Henrik for having the temerity to suggest that there might be a bug in his code.
For the problem device, is the log from SEC showing a hostname or IP address for the device sending the trap?
Yes, but that was sometime ago. Maybe before I made some other corrections to get things working. I'm tempted to just down a server to cause a trap.
There may be a problem if it's sending a status message to Hobbit with
an IP address instead of a hostname. I don't think trap.pl does a good job (or at all) of trying to resolve an IP address to a hostname that's in bb-hosts.
Yes, I've seen that. In order to get things to work, I've had to make /etc/host file entries and make sure that the sending devices are configured to send their traps via certain interfaces so that the IP address will correspond to the host file address.
Hope that helps, Andy
-----Original Message----- From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 3:41 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit not recognizing certain tests?
On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 12:43:55PM -0400, Eric Jacobs wrote:
The trap.pl uses hobbitboard to find all the hosts that have the "trap" test defined.
Bad idea - there's a chicken-and-egg problem here.
Columns do not appear in the hobbitdboard output until they exist, i.e. a status has been reported to Hobbit. So if *something* must report a "trap" status to Hobbit before the trap.pl script sees that it should do the "trap" thing ... well, I guess you can tell where I'm
going.
Scripts that implement custom tests should use the "bbhostgrep" utility to scan the bb-hosts file for the hosts that have a specific tag defined.
There is actually another way it can be done, but it's not yet documented: You can send a "hostinfo" command to hobbitd, and it will return a pre-parsed version of the bb-hosts file - one line per hosts,
with the fields delimited by '|' characters, eg: mail.hswn.dk|172.16.10.2|NET:intern|COMMENT:Internal mail server|smtp|pop3|imap
Regards, Henrik
To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk