[hobbit] bbfix functionality in hobbit

[Tom Georgoulias]

Gary B. wrote:
>> My personal opinion is that having Hobbit (or Big Brother) take action
>> other than sending an alert goes beyond the scope of what it is intended
>> for...as a monitoring system.  I had thought about the same thing at one
>> point, but was talked out of it.
> 
> I would tend to agree myself, except 1) some people are asking about
> such functionality, and 2) it would be nice during oncall weeks to not
> have to get up and restart processes such as procallator, etc.
> 
> I would be interested in hearing what talked you out of this, however.
> If nothing else, I can use it to talk other people out of it ;-)

I've thought about this kind of functionality a lot and my co-workers 
and I have discussed it several times before, and there are definitely 
pros and cons.  However, it would be cool to have a module (kinda like 
the NCV one that gives end users a lot of flexibility) that allowed 
Hobbit to execute some script/command when an alert is triggered. 
Whether that script/command then collects more debugging info about the 
alert, tries to repair the system, or opens a ticket with a ticketing 
system automatically would then be up to the end user.  That might keep 
Henrik out of a lot of scope creep.  :)

Tom