[hobbit] completely confused

[Tim Rotunda]

Henrik,
Thanks for the info.  Very helpful indeed.

I have made much progress over the last few days.  My first install of
Hobbit was on Linux RH 7.3 and I had polluted the install with lots of
experimentation.  Anyway, I have abandoned that install and have
installed Hobbit server on HP-UX 11i v1.  Took some work to get rrdtool
and fping working, but looking back it wasn't too bad, and it runs very
well.

So just for clarification, before I start, I need to install the BB
Client for the OS level reporting to Hobbit.  This is not the Hobbit
Client and if not, what is the Hobbit Client for?

I have had success in Hobbit enabling one of my apps and it works very
well.  Only issue I see is that if the app takes a powder, Hobbit Server
needs to alert me quickly.  I am still looking for the "Time to Purple"
parameter.  Any help there would be great.  I am going into a meeting on
Friday and will propose that we "Hobbit Enable" 10 or so of our "key"
applications.  Our CEO has bought off on this and so it is just a matter
of getting engineering to buy into it as well.  This will enable our IT
staff to respond very quickly to application failure.

That will take care of about half of our remote monitoring needs.  As
for the other half, I am still looking to deploy BB-Central, but looking
at the scripts, it looks pretty tightly tied into BB so I am not sure
how successful I will be with that.  I will begin this task after I get
my Hobbit server reporting CPU, disk and such.

Thanks again for the info,
Best Regards,
Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] 
Sent: Saturday, March 05, 2005 4:03 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: Re: [hobbit] completely confused

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

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