SebA wrote: ...

I pre-wrapped my e-mail to 80 characters but something wrapped it to fewer characters and messed up my formatting, so here it is again, hopefully more readable!

Hi all,

I'm interested in the different ways that people handle alerts when they are

on vacation (holiday in British English)... I'm (still!) migrating from Big

Brother BTF (still mostly use that for alerts, Xymon for the rest), and if I

went on vacation, I'd just put 1 line at the bottom of bb-alerts excluding me from all alerts (as they get SMSed to my mobile) and someone else would get them (as I was never the only one to get them anyway). But you can't do

that in Hobbit / Xymon (as I posted about last year).

So how do you do it, or what do you recommend for a network containing a variety of different machines, routers, O/Ses and services, where the primary, secondary and tertiary responsibilities for each service may be different people depending on the service - in the case where one of those people goes on vacation?

A few ways I can think of doing it using features I know already exist:

1. have a distinct e-mail address for each person that receives alerts,

that should only receive alerts and no other e-mails, and then 
redirecting that address to another person when they go on holiday 
and then redirecting back to the original person when they come back

(has the downsides of meaning that the other person gets all their 
alerts, even if they are not the most suitable person or getting 
those alerts anyway and so ending up with 2 copies of them - 
particularly annoying if they are SMSes like we use;  another 
downside is remembering to put it back when you get back from 
holiday) 

2. going through all the services for which the person going on vacation receives alerts, and changing them so that they go to someone else... Has the downsides of the tedium involved in doing it and reverting it... Might be easier if you have a special macro for each set of changes, e.g. PersonA->PersonB, PersonA->PersonC and

PersonA->Person C is 3 macros...  It is easy to change the macro 
when you get back (if you remember). 

3. following on from #2, I suppose instead of defining macros for each recipient (which is already one layer of abstraction better then the

'default'), you could define a macro for each set of primary, 
secondary and tertiary recipients (although that could make quite a 
few permutations in a large office).  Then you just have to change 
each of those macros when someone goes on holiday, and then again 
when they get back. 

4. Er, and passing mobile (cell) phones back and forth - leaving your work mobile with someone else when you have the day off - but that only works if you have a work mobile!

And then there are the ways using features that have not so far been built:

1. being able to define vacations (I know public holidays has been added to a revent version) for recipients, when they start and when they finish... being able to set a VACATIONRECIPIENT who gets the alert if the first recipient is on vacation (they will need to not get it if they are listed as the 2nd recipient too)
2. as above, but without the VACATIONRECIPIENT. Instead if one of the recipients is defined as on vacation, all the others automatically shift up in terms of any DURATION> required before sending them an alert
3. having the exclude feature that BB had, but, althought that was easy

to do before going on holiday, it was a poor solution anyway in 
terms of handling of alerts 

4. some other way... I'm not going to spend too much time thinking of them now when there may be a good solution already! ;)

Kind regards,

SebA No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.448 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3149 - Release Date: 10/07/10 18:34:00