[hobbit] purple page grouping & alert acknowledgment

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 04:24:55PM -0500, Tom Georgoulias wrote:
> Henrik Stoerner wrote:
> 
> >It's the program that generates the status message, that also
> >determines how long it is valid. So this is something you set on each
> >BB client or extension script. 
> 
> OK, that is different than BB, which only needed to have the PURPLEDELAY 
> set on the server side, in bbdef-server.sh.

No, this actually works exactly like in BB. PURPLEDELAY in BB only
determines the interval between updates of a purple status *after*
it has gone purple; it doesn't determine how long to wait before a
normal status changes to purple.

That's why when you have scripts that run once an hour, you need to send
in the status beginning with "status+65 ..." or it will go purple
before the next planned update.

> >In such cases there is little Hobbit can do. When you ack an alert,
> >you take over the responsibility for that status for the time the ack
> >is valid. If you "fix" something without checking that it actually did
> >solve the problem, you're asking for trouble.
> 
> I've been thinking about this a bit and I cannot see a clean, easy way 
> to solve it either.

Well, we agree then :-)

> >If you really want it, it's not a big problem to implement an
> >"de-acknowledge" function. It might even be worthwhile for reporting
> >purposes, to keep track of how much time your admins are using on
> >troubleshooting. I'm open to suggestions.
> 
> I can see this being helpful in cases where I'd like to wipe out all the 
> various acks for whatever reason and return a system to its normal, 
> paging self, but those situations are quite uncommon.  If it's easy to 
> implement, I wouldn't mind having it.

I knew you wouldn't :-))

Henrik