If you ever refer to the same host twice in the bbhost file, you should give it an IP address of 0.0.0.0 and set it to "noconn".

Why you might be able to do is to create a hierarchy of pages where the top page "points" to two sub pages, and each of them serves as the top of the the tree that you want to build, with new subpages to create your hierarchy.

Xymon is not very flexible in presentation, which may be a good thing since it is easy to outsmart yourself when creating elaborate displays.

Don't overlook the "Critical Systems View". You can use it to make "important" things more noticeable.

GLH

On 7/23/09, Harold J. Ballinger <hballinger at heritage-healthcare.com> wrote:

The only way that I could find to make this work was to use “include” instead of “dispinclude”, then create a second “fake host” entry with a different hostname and duplicate all of the tests using the “testip” tag, then use the NAME tag on this second “fake host”.

*Harold Ballinger*

*IT Coordinator*

Heritage Healthcare, Inc.

(888) 335-2620 | helpdesk

(864) 224-3626 | office

(864) 224-3093 | fax

[image: cid:image003.jpg at 01CA0167.D630C4A0]

Visit our website: www.heritage-healthcare.com

*From:* Harold J. Ballinger [mailto:hballinger at heritage-healthcare.com] *Sent:* Thursday, July 23, 2009 2:57 PM *To:* 'hobbit at hswn.dk' *Subject:* RE: [hobbit] Alternate view for Management

Ok, I’ve made it halfway to my goal and just need a little nudge.

I modified my bb-hosts to have includes for each page of hosts:

include bb-hosts-hosted

include bb-hosts-remote

include bb-hosts-connectivity

include bb-hosts-facilities

include bb-hosts-servers

include bb-hosts-test

include bb-hosts-corporate

I then also included:

dispinclude bb-hosts-services

and I then created the bb-hosts-services to look like:

page services Business Services

group-compress Website

111.222.33.44 www.mydomain.com # http://www.mydomain.com NAME:"Company Website" COMMENT:"Company Website" DESCR:"webserver:Company Website"

222.33.44.55 media.mydomain.com # http://media.mydomain.com ftp NAME:"Company Media Files" COMMENT:"Company Media Files" DESCR:"webserver:Company Media Files"

33.44.55.66 webstats.mydomain.com # http://webstats.mydomain.comNAME:"Website Statistics" COMMENT:"Website Statistics" DESCR:"webserver:Website Statistics"

I was attempting to get the “Business Services” page to have “friendly names” only and not the actual hostnames. I am building this one page so that I can run an Availability Report and print this single page for a 10,000 ft view of business critical services. I would like for the headings and hostnames to be “friendly names” instead of actual hostnames since the target audience for this report will be non-technical. (The actual hostnames with all appropriate tests are already defined in their appropriate pages and those pages are the ones used by IT in their day-to-day jobs.)

It looks like the dispinclude does what I expected and does not duplicate the tests for these hosts, but I couldn’t find a way to make the hostnames “friendly”. The NAME, COMMENT, and DESCR don’t seem to have any affect at all on this output. The comment doesn’t even show up in parenthesis as it normally would.

I seem to have hit a roadblock… Any ideas?

*Harold Ballinger*

*IT Coordinator*

Heritage Healthcare, Inc.

(888) 335-2620 | helpdesk

(864) 224-3626 | office

(864) 224-3093 | fax

[image: cid:image003.jpg at 01CA0167.D630C4A0]

Visit our website: www.heritage-healthcare.com

*From:* Harold J. Ballinger [mailto:hballinger at heritage-healthcare.com] *Sent:* Tuesday, July 14, 2009 12:17 PM *To:* hobbit at hswn.dk *Subject:* [hobbit] Alternate view for Management

Our support staff likes having our monitoring system setup & organized by logical category/type. However, management is more interested in a view that is organized by business impact.

For example:

IT Top Level View-

Hosted Services Corporate Connectivity

Corporate Servers Corporate Desktops

Remote Laptops Facility Connectivity

Facility Desktops

Management Top Level View-

Email (Subpage containing all dependent hosts/services)

HRMS (same as above)

Sales CRM

i.e. a listing for each “service” provided – possibly even maintained below subpages for each business unit

Management wants availability and impact by the specific service and business unit impacted (10,000 foot view showing all dependencies), while IT is interested in the detail of the cogs/gears that make it all work.

Do I just create a second listing for all of the hosts on a separate page structure? Would this generate twice as many network tests for the hosts that are listed duplicate times?

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

It sounds like you're suggesting that I could create a separate "bb-hosts-management" config file that would have the alternate configuration and layout for management (including using the NAME tag to provide friendly hostnames), then have bbgen use the "bb-hosts-management" config to create a BB3.html or something similar that is the management view.

Am I understanding you correctly?

•   Harold Ballinger IT Coordinator Heritage Healthcare, Inc. (888) 335-2620  | helpdesk (864) 224-3626  | office (864) 224-3093  | fax

Visit our website: www.heritage-healthcare.com

-----Original Message----- From: Richard Finegold [mailto:goldfndr at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2009 11:59 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Alternate view for Management

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 13:33, Harold J. Ballinger<hballinger at heritage-healthcare.com> wrote:

I know that there are a lot of you out there that are smarter than me and that know Xymon inside and out. Am I trying to get Xymon to do something that it just isn't capable of performing? I hate to have to build and manage a separate Xymon server that is just for the management view and reporting so that I can have this "Friendly View" type of report, but would that be my best option at this point?

Barring further advice, instead of building a separate server...

You could create a script that runs sed or perl or whatever to make the "Friendly view" page. I do something like this (call bash/sed a few times, admittedly only via bb-display.sh on BB for now) for some supplemental reports (e.g. company-wide sortable list of backup status/size). There are at least three options for deploying such a script: A) Change [bbdisplay] in hobbitlaunch.cfg to run a script that calls bbgen (as usual) then runs this script. Best if needed often and must be synchronized with other pages. B) Add section in hobbitlaunch.cfg for it. Best if needed often but no need for synchronization. My xymon site has two bbgen launches: once for grouping by type, a second time for grouping by location (bbgen --pageset). C) Add as a CGI (on-demand, like the rrdtool graphs, etc.) rather than a static page. Best if rarely needed.

If it's only a few rows then hardcoded values will suffice. It could become scalable and maintainable if the script uses values from bbhostgrep or something similar.

To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk

On Thursday 23 July 2009 21:33:17 Harold J. Ballinger wrote:

It looks like the NAME and COMMENT tags only apply for the host entry that is preferred with the "prefer" tag. This means that it will change the name for both pages and that I can't have the host display a friendly name on one page but an actual hostname on the other.

The only way that I could find to make this work was to use "include" instead of "dispinclude", then create a second "fake host" entry with a different hostname and duplicate all of the tests using the "testip" tag, then use the NAME tag on this second "fake host". This means that all tests are duplicated and that the tests reported on this page are against the IP (and would not reflect host resolution issues.)

I know that there are a lot of you out there that are smarter than me and that know Xymon inside and out. Am I trying to get Xymon to do something that it just isn't capable of performing? I hate to have to build and manage a separate Xymon server that is just for the management view and reporting so that I can have this "Friendly View" type of report, but would that be my best option at this point?

Would it not make more sense to use the bbcombotest instead for this ?

BTW, while the weathermap script I mainly developed for use with devmon (some examples here: http://staff.telkomsa.net/~bgmilne/weathermap/) it could quite easily be modified to display a graphical representation of business services (if hobbit status information is available for the test specified, the background of the text will display the test color), possibly with dependencies.

Regards, Buchan

I noticed the logic below seems to still be present in 4.3.0-RC1 (line 211 in xymond/combostatus.c). Does anyone know if it's still occurring or if this patch is still needed?

-jc

-----Original Message----- From: Francesco Duranti [mailto:fduranti at q8.it] Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 10:31 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] Bug in bbcombotest 4.3.0-beta2

Hi all, I don't know if anyone use it or is interested but there's a bug in 4.3.0-beta2 (and 4.4.0 too) related to the bbcombotest.

The bug is at line 216 in the if just after the sendmessage...

This is the code interested... the problem is that in 4.3.0 variable board is not passed to sendmessage anymore (as in 4.2.3) so the if for the error is always true and the test are not checked.

            hobbitdresult = sendmessage("hobbitdboard fields=hostname,testname,color", NULL,

BBTALK_TIMEOUT, sres); if ((hobbitdresult != BB_OK) || (board == NULL)) { board = ""; *errptr += sprintf(*errptr, "Could not access hobbitd board, error %d\n", hobbitdresult); return COL_CLEAR; }

Changing the "if" to "if (hobbitdresult != BB_OK) {" should solve the problem.