[hobbit] Some thoughts about alerts, acks and escalations

[Larry.Barber at usda.gov]

Yes, very useful. I think the biggest flaw with BigBrother is the way
one red alert can mask subsequent red alerts, even alerts from different
machines. There needs to be a way for the operations people to clear an
alert after they've noticed it and logged it. 

Thanks,
Larry Barber


On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 00:49 -0500, henrik at hswn.dk wrote:
> I'm beginning to look at the issue of escalating alerts. And I've had 
> an idea that I'd like to get some feedback on before I go ahead and 
> implement it.
> 
> Right now, Hobbit doesn't handle escalating an alert. When someone 
> receives an alert message, they can ack it - when they do, all alerts 
> stop and the item disappears from the "Critical systems" page (the NK 
> page).
> 
> BB has the concept of escalating an alert, meaning that some 
> recipients of an alert will get the alert message even if the alert 
> has been acknowledged.
> 
> 
> What I'd like to have is the BB system with a finer granularity. A 
> recipient in the hobbit-alerts.cfg file has an associated "level", 
> default is 1.
> 
> I want our NOC guys who do nothing but stare at the NK page 24x7 to
> be 
> able to acknowledge an alert - and that just gets it off their 
> monitor, it doesn't stop alerts from going out. A "level 0" 
> acknowledgment - this is just to log that a trouble ticket has been 
> raised for the issue.
> 
> A technician (who is a "level 1" recipient) can acknowledge the alert 
> he receives - this will stop alert messages from going out to other 
> "level 1" receipients, so all of the engineers can concentrate on 
> doing what needs to be done. 
> 
> Alerts will still be sent to recipients who are "level 2" and above - 
> these are the equivalent of the BB "escalation" alerts. They can ack 
> the alert if they'd like to turn off more alert messages, of course.
> 
> You can have even higher levels if you like, probably going up the 
> hierarchy of managers. I don't think we'll using more than the 3 
> levels I've described, but there is no reason to impose any limit.
> 
> 
> Does that sound like it would be useful?
> 
> 
> Regards, 
> Henrik
> 
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