[hobbit] Acking alerts without the ID

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 02:31:03PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
> With Hobbit you have to enter the alert ID which was sent out in the 
> notification email. The problem with that is we have many people who 
> only watch the web page, or the just plain don't want to have to go to 
> their email to cut and paste and alert id, especially for multiple alerts.
> 
> Is there any chance that Hobbit will have a more user-friendly Ack 
> mechanism soon?

Yes, it is in the works. Version 4.2 - currently in alfa - already has it 
for the new "Critical systems" view.

This change also introduces a new concept of acknowledging alerts at
different levels of the organization. An ack done by the team monitoring
the critical systems is a "level 1" ack; it won't stop any alerts from 
going out, but it will get the status off their webpage. Techs can 
acknowledge an alert as "level 2" - it stops alerts from going out to
people on their level, but doesn't prevent alerts from escalation to
higher-level people (managers and such). Getting this into the alert
module takes a bit of work, which is why 4.2 will only have the
limited support for the "Critical systems" view.

I'm still somewhat undecided about whether to keep the ack ID for acks
done by e-mail; when ack'ing something off the webpage you can require
user authentication for the webpage. For e-mail acks some sort of user
authentication is needed, and the ack ID is a kind of token which
provides this. So I'll probably keep the ACK id for acks that arrive
through paths other than the web.


Regards,
Henrik