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Jeff,<br>
<br>
That's a very good point. Do you know if anyone has documented setting
up MRTG with Hobbit? I searched the mailing list archives and didn't
find anything concise. <br>
<br>
I will probably end up recommending and implementing the MRTG solution,
but I still think it should be trivial for hobbit to alert on the ping
response, since it already collects that data. I guess a real solution
would be for hobbit to come with an MRTG module "out of the box" so
that users didn't have to delve into the knowledgebase and/or depend on
places like deadcat to find and provide the functionality they need. <br>
<br>
I myself don't mind using external scripts and having to tinker with
something to get it to work the way I want, but its hard enough to sell
management on Hobbit over commercial and well known tools like Nagios,
without having to reveal that you need to spend a day downloading
external scripts and making them work in order to get the functionality
that they expect (and that they think that the commercial tools already
have).<br>
<br>
I believe that a well-setup hobbit monitor is superior to Nagios and
other tools I have tested and been forced to use over the years. But
the fact that a lot of the application-specific monitoring (mysql,
oracle, postgres, etc), as well as traffic monitoring (MRTG) is handled
by third-party scripts that you have to meld into your server probably
scares away a lot of people, especially management types who have
security folks whispering in their ear to never trust third-party
modules and especially not code written by "joe-user from some website"
(a manager actually said that to me once). As of yet Hobbit does not
even have a fully functional client (no logfile parsing), so we have to
use either the bb-client or the bb-msgs script....more third party
plugins.<br>
<br>
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, I guess what I'm saying is I
would like to see Hobbit come with built-in support for monitoring
common applications and services (besides the basics). It's already
partway there as Hobbit can natively check things like mysql, but what
about postgres, oracle? <br>
<br>
Henrik is a busy guy I am sure, and he probably doesn't get much
compensation for all the fine work he does on Hobbit, nor does he ask
for any (I did buy him one of his wishlist items, I hope others do as
well). As far as I know, Henrik has nobody helping him, except for
seeing him mention someone was working on a new Hobbit client. Maybe
what we need is more people to roll up their sleeves and write some
modules that are compatible with hobbit with little or no tweaking.
Sadly I'm no C/C++ guru, but I am pretty good with Perl :-) <br>
<br>
I think also perhaps we need an "official" repository of scripts that
work with Hobbit, so when someone needs an addon, they can grab an
already Hobbit-ized one, instead of going to deadcat and getting a
script to hack on. Also a Wiki might be handy, so that Hobbit users can
easily share and update information on various Hobbit setups and
problems.<br>
<br>
Okay, I have written WAY more than I intended here, I'm so far off
topic now that I will edit the subject line as a warning :)<br>
<br>
-Charles<br>
<br>
Jeff Newman wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid941506840601131312j7feeb189g622d3b7e9822dc1a@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div>Really, honestly, im not trying to belabor a point here, but you
need to be careful as the ping only runs every 5 minutes, so even if
you could get this alerting to work, the link would have to be slow
during a ping cycle. So it could possible be slow for 4 minutes,
recover, and the page wouldn't happen, as the ping time would be ok.
Assuming the client saw the slowness during those 4 minutes via other
methods, they would then question why hobbit didn't see it.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Same thing hapens to me with spikes in network traffic between
polling periods, I don't see them.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>With MRTG, you can shorten the time to 1 minute. MRTG
integration with hobbit isn't too hard, so thats probably the route you
should go.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>-Jeff</div>
<div><br>
<br>
</div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 1/13/06, <b
class="gmail_sendername">Charles Jones</b> <<a
href="mailto:jonescr@cisco.com">jonescr@cisco.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Deal,
Richard wrote:
<blockquote
cite="http://midCAAF27359A31D44FA9A90AF7E299C36FF5A63D@EXCHANGE.TIGR.ORG"
type="cite">
<div><span class="q">
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;">Sounds like
they need to through in MRTG and go red when the traffic is high on the
link.</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;">And then
throw in things like </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;">bb-ospf.pl
to check that ospf is not flapping over the link</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;">bb-xsnmp.pl
to check out the routers at each end and the interfaces</span></font></p>
</span></div>
</blockquote>
Yeah I'm aware of the existance of bb-mrtg.pl, although I have never
set it up. I guess I was hoping that Hobbit could natively support
ping testing rather than having to install mrtg and hack stuff in. Its
sort of confusing for a newbie when you are showing them the ropes of
Hobbit and start bringing external scripts into the mix (especially
ones that require modifying before they will work).
<br>
<blockquote
cite="http://midCAAF27359A31D44FA9A90AF7E299C36FF5A63D@EXCHANGE.TIGR.ORG"
type="cite">
<div><span class="q">
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;"></span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;">you can also
use http to a reliable server on the remote side as part of the link
test. Just make the http test for the link dependent on the router and
the conn test to the web server.
</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;"> </span></font></p>
</span></div>
</blockquote>
That won't work in this case as all of the companies servers are in a
CoLo, Hobbit is running at the CoLo, and they want to test the T1 link
at the office from the CoLo (there are no servers on the other side of
the office T1 to do a test against), and even if there was, it still
would not give them a heads-up to the T1 being slow/saturated, as
Hobbit only alerts when the conn test outright fails.
<br>
<span class="sg"><br>
-Charles</span>
<div><span class="e" id="q_108c508e597577c0_6"><br>
<blockquote
cite="http://midCAAF27359A31D44FA9A90AF7E299C36FF5A63D@EXCHANGE.TIGR.ORG"
type="cite">
<div>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" face="Arial" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: navy; font-family: Arial;"> </span></font></p>
<div
style="border-style: none none none solid; border-color: -moz-use-text-color; border-width: medium medium medium 1.5pt; padding: 0in 0in 0in 4pt;">
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;" align="center"><font
color="black" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; color: windowtext;">
<hr align="center" size="2" width="100%"></span></font></div>
<p><b><font color="black" face="Tahoma" size="2"><span
style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 10pt; color: windowtext; font-family: Tahoma;">From:</span></font></b><font
color="black" face="Tahoma" size="2"><span
style="font-size: 10pt; color: windowtext; font-family: Tahoma;">
Charles Jones [<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="mailto:jonescr@cisco.com" target="_blank">mailto:jonescr@cisco.com</a>]
<br>
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Friday,
January 13, 2006 1:01 PM
<br>
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> <a
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="mailto:hobbit@hswn.dk" target="_blank">hobbit@hswn.dk</a><br>
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Cc:</span>
</b> <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="mailto:crimson@technologist.com" target="_blank">crimson@technologist.com</a><br>
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> [hobbit]
conn alerts based on ping time
</span></font><font color="black"><span style="color: windowtext;"></span></font></p>
</div>
<p><font color="black" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span
style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="black" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span
style="font-size: 12pt;">I'm helping someone set up Hobbit at their
company, and they want to monitor the status of a remote office T1
link. Of course Hobbit can tell them if the link goes totally down, or
you can ignore bad pings with "badconn", but they want to know when
the link is <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">slow</span></b>, as
they often have periods of time when the pings are not dropped, but
instead taking 1-3 seconds (instead of <100ms like normal). <br>
<br>
Is there any chance that Hobbit will soon support comparing the ping
replies to specifiied values for green, yellow, and red?
<br>
<br>
Somethign like:<br>
<br>
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://1.2.3.4/" target="_blank">1.2.3.4</a> <a
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://myhost.com/" target="_blank">
myhost.com</a> # conn:200:500<br>
<br>
This would make <a
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://myhost.com/" target="_blank">myhost.com</a>'s conn test
go yellow if the ping was between 200 and 500ms, and red if it was over
500ms.
<br>
Since hobbit already graphs the numeric values of the ping replies,
this seems like it would be fairly easy to add?<br>
<br>
-Charles</span></font></p>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
</span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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