On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 10:37:51AM -0500, Maschino, Shawn (GE Indust, Plastics) wrote:

        To better describe my situation - I have all my servers in

Hobbit, and then a database that has server details - like site, criticality, ... and I'm looking to be able to run reports like - "what was my conn test uptime for anything at site XYZ", or "what was my http uptime for our business critical apps".

I can easily query the database and load the server list into an array as the source list to process, but when it comes to knowing how to process the Hobbit data files to get the % uptime for that list of servers I am lost. I suppose in a perfect solution I'd be looking to be able to populate and array with the list of hostnames, pass that and the test name that I'm looking for to a routine, and get back a single number as the % uptime for that list of hosts for that test.

Hobbit has some built in availability reporting, which also lets you output the result in a CSV format for importing into a spreadsheet. But that only gives you availability for each of the status columns in Hobbit - which is not very useful, when you want to combine multiple statuses into a single availability measure.

The easiest way would be if you know what combinations you want to measure in advance. E.g. if you have 4 webservers handling you business app, and you run an http check on all 4, then you can make a combotest out of those 4. E.g. if you add this to the bbcombotest.cfg file:

app01.http=(web01.http+web02.http+web03.http+web04.http)>=2

then you'll get a status for the host "app01" where the "http" column will be green if 2 or more of the web01-04 http columns are green.

Then you can run the normal Hobbit availability report, and it will give you the percentage available for the combined test also, which is what you want.

If that is not sufficient - e.g. you want to do ad-hoc queries that combine hosts/tests you had not planned in advance - then it gets complicated. The historical logs for each status are in the ~hobbit/data/hist/HOSTNAME.COLUMN files, but they only log when a status changes color. In the Hobbit source, lib/availability.c is the file that deals with calculating availability - you're free to have a look at how it works. It does have a debugging utility built-in, but this won't build in the current version (I rarely use it nowadays). If you pickup the current snapshot you can see how it's used: E.g. running

./lib/availability /var/lib/hobbit/hist/osiris.hobbitd
date +%s --date="01 Jan 2006" date +%s

will call the routine that determines how much time the hobbitd column has had the various color from Jan 1st until now.

Regards, Henrik