In snmp (I realize xymon is not native snmp-based) there is a common concept of admin status and oper status. Briefly, admin status is what the manager set for an object and oper status is its current status. The classic example is Ethernet where the manager can ifconfig an interface down or up (that would be the admin status) while the current link status would be oper.
I'm having trouble mapping this set of status values to the single color that xymon allows. At first, I was marking some objects (manually, via my own snmp-based poller) as blue if the object was a 'controlled down' and red if it was supposed to be up but its current status was down. However, I'm not sure this is the best way to do this. I'm considering using 'clear' as the color for unknown or unpolled or not-yet-polled values but also for controlled-down objects. Using red for 'admin==up, oper==down' seems to be a good use of red in xymon. And blue is an 'on-hold' status where you have turned off polling or you want to ignore a certain object and not have its value change (also not have it appear in the 'non-greens' display). But if an object is blue, I will never change it to non-blue until the mgmt interface (in xymon or via messages sent to xymon server) specifically take that object off the on-hold list.
Has there been any thought to evolving the xymon color and status concepts to include the duality of admin and oper? It seems that trying to compress the 2 states into one is problematic and not very clean in architecture.
I'm curious what people have done in this regard.