recovery emails on alerts which don't generate pages == undesired behaviour

[Bruce Lysik]

Hi,

Previously, we've only wanted to alert on red and purples, and then send recovery emails when it changes out of a red or purple state.  This was easily accomplished by setting --alertcolors to red,purple.

Recently however, I've gotten some requests from people who want to get alerted on a few monitors when they yellow.  No problem, I thought.  I'll just change --alertcolors back to default, and then add COLOR=red,purple to all the existing alert definitions to start.

This caused the problem where a monitor would go into a yellow state (not causing a page because COLOR=red,purple) and then go back to green (which would then send a recovery page).  This current behaviour doesn't make sense.  Why would I want to be alerted on a recovery of something that never generated an alert in the first place?  It would make more sense if the recovery email condition was tied to the COLOR definition.

So an alert with COLOR=red,yellow,purple (the default) would send a recovery message on leaving the red, yellow, or purple state to green, blue, or clear.  

And an alert with COLOR=red,purple would only send a recovery message if it was leaving a red or purple state.

Or maybe I'm braindead and can't see how this can be accomplished currently.

Comments?  

--
Bruce Z. Lysik  <blysik at shutterfly.com>
Operations Engineer