Hi Larry,
Oops! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
Cheers, Phil
2009/10/1 Larry Barber <lebarber at gmail.com>
From the bb man page:
status[+LIFETIME][/group:GROUP] HOSTNAME.TESTNAME COLOR <additional text> This sends in a status message for a single test (column) on a single host. TESTNAME is the name of the column where this test will show up; any name is valid except that using dots in the testname will not work. COLOR must be one of the valid colors: "green", "yellow", "red" or "clear". The colors "blue" and "purple" - although valid colors - should not be sent in a status-message, as these are handled specially by the Hobbit server. The "additional text" normally includes a local timestamp and a summary of the test result on the first line. Any lines following the first one are free-form, and can include any information that may be useful to diagnose the problem being reported. The LIFETIME defines how long this status is valid after being received by the Hobbit server. The default is 30 minutes, but you can set any period you like. E.g. for a custom test that runs once an hour, you will want to set this to at least 60 minutes - otherwise the status will go purple after 30 minutes. It is a good idea to set the LIFETIME to sligtly more than the interval between your tests, to allow for variations in the time it takes your test to complete. The LIFETIME is in minutes, unless you add an "h" (hours), "d" (days) or "w" (weeks) immediately after the number, e.g. "status+5h" for a status that is valid for 5 hours. The GROUP option is used to direct alerts from the status to a specific group. It is currently used for status generated from the Hobbit clients’ data, e.g. to direct alerts for a "procs" status to different people, depending on exactly which process is down.
Thanks, Larry Barber
On 10/1/09, Phil Meech <pmeech at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi All,
Firstly apologies if this is something I should have been able to locate on the mailing list; I've had a quick look but nothing appeared to answer it...
I have an external test (shell script) that runs on my Xymon server (4.2.3), and logs into device web servers and gets a segment of HTML and performs some processing on it and sends to the xymon via the bb command. As there are 100 of these devices, I dont really want to be running this test every 10 minutes or so; and I also dont want to have 100 hosts going purple after 20 minutes. I realise I could call hobbitd with the --no-purple option; but purple is useful under many of the other tests.
Is there a way of specifying no purple status on a per test basis? If I specify a hobbitlaunch time of greater than 20 minutes, would the test go purple waiting for hobbitlaunch to run the external again? Is there any other way that I could run this test once, every 4 hours and stop it going purple?
As a last ditch resort I was considering storing the status messages (retrieved every 4 hours ideally via the shell script) in different files (per host) on the Xymon server and repeatedly sending this message every 10 minutes (hence preventing purple statuses). Although this would work, it doesnt seem a particularly clean method.
Thanks for your time, Phil