Thanks! Your information is really helpful, I now understand this is not a bug, and it's a build-in feature of Hobbit and well documented in man page.

We don't have defined LIFETIME, so more like to use INTERVAL to control status. I'll shorten the internal from 30m to 25m to avoid this problem.

Samuel Cai

From: Ralph Mitchell [mailto:ralphmitchell at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:44 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Tricky bug in Purple status determination

When a report comes in to Hobbit, the default "time to live" for the report is 30 mins. As long as another report comes in within that time, the timer is reset. If there's no report, that column goes purple.

If your test is reporting every 30 mins, there's a good chance it'll exhibit the behaviour you describe.

What you should do is alter the test script to use the "status+LIFETIME" format, where LIFETIME is the life span of the report, as described in the bb man page, and make the lifetime a bit longer than the the test interval.

Ralph Mitchell

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 9:43 PM, Samuel Cai <Samuel.Cai at ehealth-china.com> wrote:

Hi,

Recently we found a weird problem in history of one monitoring, there were a lot of purple status, and the duration was "none" or 1second. The thing we were monitoring was running fine, and this problem was there since we used Hobbit (more than half a year), so it rules out possibility of error in that thing.

This monitoring is a script defined in hobbitlaunch.cfg on Hobbit server, runs every 30m

I checked log, the purple status was updated by hobbitd, and then I checked source code of hobbitd, found it checked purple status every 30m (correct me if I'm wrong since I only know a little of C), so I guess due to some program issues, there were some milliseconds differences bettwen hobbitd's determination and script's update, that results in very short duration of purple status.

So after I changed interval to 25m, that weird problem is gone.

Thanks,

Samuel Cai