[hobbit] completely confused

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 12:32:27PM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
> Ok, maybe I have spent too much time looking at too many different man
> pages for too many different products.  Whatever the case may be, I
> could really use a cold slap in the face.

Well, it's pretty cold outside so if I stick my hand in the snow for a
couple of minutes, I'll try and provide what you're asking for :-)


> -         It looks like I need to install Hobbit and BB-Client to
> monitor the OS level on the Hobbit server.  True?

Yes. I guess with "OS level" you mean stuff like disk utilisation, 
what the load is on the box, if processes are running and such.
You need something running on the box to get those data - that
"something" is the BB client.


> -         Can I "hobbit" enable my applications to report status from
> remote servers without any middleware (bb-client)?
> 
> o       I would think this could be a "one liner" in my apps (20-30 of
> them) to report their internal status.????

You can do that, and if you have the possibility of adding such a
"health check" function in your application, it is by far the best and
most rewarding way of monitoring application availability. Since the
application knows best what errors and problems can occur, it has the
option of checking for those - like if it needs a database connection,
it can check if there's a database available and responding by doing a
query on one of the tables. Or if some other ressource is needed, it
can check up on that.

There are (at least) two ways for an application to report its status
to Hobbit. 

One way is that the application periodically - on its own - sends in a
status report about its health; this means building a small status
message in the format

  status HOSTNAME.APPLICATIONNAME green 05 Mar 2005 22:51

  The FOO application is up and running

(If there's a problem, you can obviously make it yellow or red, and
include whatever troubleshooting information is relevant). After
building the message, either setup a tcp connection to the hobbit
server on port 1984 and just send this message across, or use the
"bb" client program which is included with Hobbit to handle the
details of getting the message across to the Hobbit server.


The other way of doing this is if your application is
web-enabled. Then you can let the application generate a dynamic
webpage with the status of the application, and just setup a network
test in Hobbit where you check the contents of that webpage to see if
everything is OK. One of my customers has done this with all of the
web-applications: The simply have a "checkOK" webpage that returns the
status of the application, and sets the background color of the
webpage to green if it is ok. So in Hobbit I just have a simple
webpage content check to request this page and look for a
"BGCOLOR=#00FF00" string which will be there if everything is OK. In
bb-hosts that is

  10.0.0.1   www.foo.com  # cont=myapp;http://www.foo.com/app;BGCOLOR=#00FF00

This generates a "myapp" column with the contents of the webpage - if
the BGCOLOR string is found then the status is green, otherwise it is
red.


> -         Where can I see the message format for sending my own messages
> to the display server, if that is possible?

The "bb" manpage has a description of the messages you can send to
Hobbit.


> -         It looks like if I want to use bb-central:

I'm not really qualified to answer questions on bb-central since I've
never used it. I am sure someone else can help you with this.



Regards,
Henrik