conn alerts based on ping time
I'm helping someone set up Hobbit at their company, and they want to monitor the status of a remote office T1 link. Of course Hobbit can tell them if the link goes totally down, or you can ignore bad pings with "badconn", but they want to know when the link is *slow*, as they often have periods of time when the pings are not dropped, but instead taking 1-3 seconds (instead of <100ms like normal).
Is there any chance that Hobbit will soon support comparing the ping replies to specifiied values for green, yellow, and red?
Somethign like:
1.2.3.4 myhost.com # conn:200:500
This would make myhost.com's conn test go yellow if the ping was between 200 and 500ms, and red if it was over 500ms. Since hobbit already graphs the numeric values of the ping replies, this seems like it would be fairly easy to add?
-Charles
On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 11:01:11AM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
Is there any chance that Hobbit will soon support comparing the ping replies to specifiied values for green, yellow, and red?
"soon" is asking for a lot :-)
As I wrote in another thread - yes, that is going to show up in Hobbit sometime. It won't be specifically for the "conn" test, but rather I am planning a facility so that all of the data that goes into the RRD's can trigger a change of status color. And this would then in turn trigger all of the normal effects like alerts, history logging and such.
Somethign like:
1.2.3.4 myhost.com # conn:200:500
This would make myhost.com's conn test go yellow if the ping was between 200 and 500ms, and red if it was over 500ms.
The bb-hosts file is getting overloaded, and at some point we'll have to think of a better way of configuring Hobbit. But yes - some way of setting thresholds for these data and changing the status color if they are exceeded.
Since hobbit already graphs the numeric values of the ping replies, this seems like it would be fairly easy to add?
As always, the devil's in the detail. The particular reason why this is not as easy as it sounds is that the color of a network test status is currently determined exclusively by the network test tool - which may run on a separate host from the main hobbit server, which is the one that looks at the network test output and picks out the ping time that goes into the graph.
So by the time Hobbit learns what the ping time is, we're long past the point where the status color has been decided.
The idea then is to have some sort of status color modification mechanism - so even though the network tester reports "green", the RRD module can tell Hobbit "no, make it be red because the ping time is higher than 3 seconds".
I just need to come up with a good way of configuring it, and design the status-override mechanism to work sanely with history logs and such (you don't want the RRD override to show up in the history logs in a way so the status flip-flops between green from the network tester and red from the RRD override).
Henrik
If I missed some other part of the discussion, I apologize. Couldn't this just be handled by the code that analyzes the fping results?
For hosts that need to respond in a certain amount of time, maybe add a number to the conn test indicator:
1.1.1.1 myhost # conn:3
Without the above specification everything would work as before, but with it if a ping to myhost goes more than 3 seconds generate a red condition.
Henrik Stoerner wrote:
I just need to come up with a good way of configuring it, and design the status-override mechanism to work sanely with history logs and such (you don't want the RRD override to show up in the history logs in a way so the status flip-flops between green from the network tester and red from the RRD override).
-- Rich Smrcina VM Assist, Inc. Main: (262)392-2026 Cell: (414)491-6001 Ans Service: (360)715-2467 rich.smrcina at vmassist.com
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On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 10:01:25PM -0600, Rich Smrcina wrote:
If I missed some other part of the discussion, I apologize. Couldn't this just be handled by the code that analyzes the fping results?
It could, but I'd rather have a general solution to the problem of "how do you alert based on the performance data" than a specific solution that only does the "alert me when the ping time is too great".
Henrik
participants (3)
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henrik@hswn.dk
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jonescr@cisco.com
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rsmrcina@wi.rr.com