I'm doing my best to persuade my group to switch from Nagios to Hobbit, and Nagios is liked that much so it shouldn't be too hard, but I know there is one Nagios feature they are going to complain is missing from hobbit - the ease of acking an alert. In Nagios you can click on any alert and choose to ack it.
With Hobbit you have to enter the alert ID which was sent out in the notification email. The problem with that is we have many people who only watch the web page, or the just plain don't want to have to go to their email to cut and paste and alert id, especially for multiple alerts.
Is there any chance that Hobbit will have a more user-friendly Ack mechanism soon? If anything at least the alert ID could be displayed on the alert page, to allow it to be cut and paste from there. I don't want them to end up using DISABLE when they should be using Acknowledge, just because it's easier to do.
On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 02:31:03PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
With Hobbit you have to enter the alert ID which was sent out in the notification email. The problem with that is we have many people who only watch the web page, or the just plain don't want to have to go to their email to cut and paste and alert id, especially for multiple alerts.
Is there any chance that Hobbit will have a more user-friendly Ack mechanism soon?
Yes, it is in the works. Version 4.2 - currently in alfa - already has it for the new "Critical systems" view.
This change also introduces a new concept of acknowledging alerts at different levels of the organization. An ack done by the team monitoring the critical systems is a "level 1" ack; it won't stop any alerts from going out, but it will get the status off their webpage. Techs can acknowledge an alert as "level 2" - it stops alerts from going out to people on their level, but doesn't prevent alerts from escalation to higher-level people (managers and such). Getting this into the alert module takes a bit of work, which is why 4.2 will only have the limited support for the "Critical systems" view.
I'm still somewhat undecided about whether to keep the ack ID for acks done by e-mail; when ack'ing something off the webpage you can require user authentication for the webpage. For e-mail acks some sort of user authentication is needed, and the ack ID is a kind of token which provides this. So I'll probably keep the ACK id for acks that arrive through paths other than the web.
Regards, Henrik
Henrik Stoerner wrote:
On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 02:31:03PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
With Hobbit you have to enter the alert ID which was sent out in the notification email. The problem with that is we have many people who only watch the web page, or the just plain don't want to have to go to their email to cut and paste and alert id, especially for multiple alerts.
Is there any chance that Hobbit will have a more user-friendly Ack mechanism soon?
Yes, it is in the works. Version 4.2 - currently in alfa - already has it for the new "Critical systems" view.
This change also introduces a new concept of acknowledging alerts at different levels of the organization. An ack done by the team monitoring the critical systems is a "level 1" ack; it won't stop any alerts from going out, but it will get the status off their webpage. Techs can acknowledge an alert as "level 2" - it stops alerts from going out to people on their level, but doesn't prevent alerts from escalation to higher-level people (managers and such). Getting this into the alert module takes a bit of work, which is why 4.2 will only have the limited support for the "Critical systems" view.
I'm still somewhat undecided about whether to keep the ack ID for acks done by e-mail; when ack'ing something off the webpage you can require user authentication for the webpage. For e-mail acks some sort of user authentication is needed, and the ack ID is a kind of token which provides this. So I'll probably keep the ACK id for acks that arrive through paths other than the web.
Regards, Henrik
Attached is a temporary ACK-code web page solution you can try until Henrik finishes. It's not great but should do OK for people who don't use e-mail. It builds a web page table from the hobbitboard output. The table gets embedded in a frame of the current acknowledge alert page. The table lists the hostname, check and ACK codes. Cut and Paste the ACK code you want to acknowledge, enter your text message, select the time and send.
John
participants (3)
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henrik＠hswn.dk
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johng＠idttechnology.com
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jonescr＠cisco.com