[hobbit] purple page grouping & alert acknowledgment

[Tom Georgoulias]

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

> I tried it now, and ack'ing a purple status seems to work ok. I'll see
> if it stops sending me alerts.

I am able to ack as well, so that works.

While were on the topic of purple status messages...Hobbit is config'd 
to turn a host purple if it hasn't heard from it in 30 mins.  I want 
mine to go purple after 15, so I changed the PURPLEDELAY from "30" to 
"15" in hobbitserver.cfg, but that doesn't seem to make a difference. 
What else needs to be changed?

> Ack'ing should not have any influence on whether data is collected or
> not. What matters is if there are any updates - if the host is down,
> you obviously won't be getting any new reports, and then the graphs
> won't update.

In the cases where I was testing and observed the behavior above (a 97% 
full disk partition), the client was online and sending data but the 
graphs had stalled.

This doesn't seem to be happening on RC4, so something was either fixed 
or the fresh install on my end helped.

>  > Also, how can I unacknowledge a host, if I fix a problem before the time
>  > that I estimated it would take?
> 
> You cannot, but the acknowledge should clear automatically as soon as
> an OK status arrives.

I think I found a loop hole that may cause problems in certain 
circumstances:  Say I get a red alert for something, give an estimate of 
120 mins to fix it, and the host goes purple 45 mins later (i.e. it 
crashes), before the ack clears.  That ack stays in the red state and I 
won't get a page for the red -> purple transition until after the 120 
mins passed and paging resumes (presumably because the ack wasn't 
cleared because it never went green before going purple).  This could be 
bad news if I have a system that crashes when the support tech is busy 
with other things or if a system is brought back online after a purple 
status and returns to something non green (i.e. disk is the only thing 
that is monitored on the system, and it immediately goes to red after 
boot up and stays that way for a while).

Tom