McDonald, Dan <mailto:Dan.McDonald at austinenergy.com> wrote:

On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 18:14 +0000, SebA wrote:

...

Additionally (ideally): I would like to know results of continuous pings. Rather than just sending a few pings every x minutes and seeing the performance of those, it would be nice to have continuous, or at least pings that are continuous for the duration specifed in the new bb-hosts flag I have suggested above, e.g. at 5 or 10 second intervals (so as not to overload routers or links), and to report the results of these tests every x minutes (again, ideally, defined by the new tag I have suggested above).

I solve that particular problem by dumping all of my syslogs from all routers into a common syslog server, then watch for routing protocol state changes (EIGRP up or down). When I see a change down, I send a red message, and when I see an up, I send a green message.

It's a little more complicated than that, since I have to maintain state for all of these tests over several years. The module I wrote is bb-eigrp, and it's on deadcat, but works fine with xymon

Interesting. We don't use EIGRP though. However, I expect it could be adapted to other syslog messages. I suppose the module just needs to know what UP and DOWN messages can look like... Even though, that won't cover every single link in our network - not all devices support syslog (e.g. dumb switching hubs and ADSL routers). I think I would rather a better ping test, and then just red / yellow alarm certain syslog messages in the msgs column (because links can stop working even when the managed switch/router thinks they are still up (or before it thinks they are down)). Not to say I won't take a look at your module at some point...

SebA