Enable/Disable by page name instead of hostname(s)?

Charles Jones jonescr at cisco.com
Mon Nov 20 19:16:03 CET 2006


Is this possible to do?  Heres the situation I am trying to avoid. When 
there is going to be maintenance activities on all of the servers (let's 
say a kernel upgrade). Putting them all into disable mode literally 
floods the alert pagers and email with hundreds of messages  (they have 
NOTICE tag). I have my Hobbit pages built thus that the main page has 
subpages for Prod, Stage, and Dev. Each one of those has sub-pages for 
Web, App, and Database tiers.

It would be nice if there was a way to enable/disable/acknowledge by 
page name, or a pre-defined groupname. Then for example one could 
disable the "Prod" group, and only one disable notice alert gets sent, 
instead of one for every host. Alternatively, perhaps an option could be 
added to allow a host(s) to be "silently" enabled/disabled, such that no 
alerts are sent to addresses using the NOTICE tag.

Other ways I can think of to deal with this:
1. Do not use NOTICE tag. Not really an option, but could temporarily 
remove it before doing an enable/disable of many hosts in order to 
reduce the spam.
2. Use DOWNTIME in bb-hosts, instead of using the interactive 
enable/disable. This would work but requires manual editing of the 
bb-hosts file, which takes away the usefulness of enabling/disabling 
from the web interface.

Both of the above provide a workaround, but are not optimal.

-Charles





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