Is this possible to do? Heres the situation I am trying to avoid. When there is going to be maintenance activities on all of the servers (let's say a kernel upgrade). Putting them all into disable mode literally floods the alert pagers and email with hundreds of messages (they have NOTICE tag). I have my Hobbit pages built thus that the main page has subpages for Prod, Stage, and Dev. Each one of those has sub-pages for Web, App, and Database tiers.
It would be nice if there was a way to enable/disable/acknowledge by page name, or a pre-defined groupname. Then for example one could disable the "Prod" group, and only one disable notice alert gets sent, instead of one for every host. Alternatively, perhaps an option could be added to allow a host(s) to be "silently" enabled/disabled, such that no alerts are sent to addresses using the NOTICE tag.
Other ways I can think of to deal with this:
- Do not use NOTICE tag. Not really an option, but could temporarily remove it before doing an enable/disable of many hosts in order to reduce the spam.
- Use DOWNTIME in bb-hosts, instead of using the interactive enable/disable. This would work but requires manual editing of the bb-hosts file, which takes away the usefulness of enabling/disabling from the web interface.
Both of the above provide a workaround, but are not optimal.
-Charles