[hobbit] Remote TCP checks consolidation

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 03:46:01PM -0700, Charles Jones -X (charljon - Cisco Learning Institute at Cisco) wrote:
> I need to monitor approximately a dozen TCP ports on a bunch of remote hosts. What is the easiest way to group these under one column heading?
>  
> I thought about using the PORTS checking ability of the remote clients, but sadly past history in the case has shown that just because netstat shows that the port is listening on the remote server, doesn't mean that you can connect to it (broken firewall rules, or the app not responding, etc).
>  
> In some of the cases, the application is a Tomcat server, which listens on half a dozen ports. Im thinking the easiest way to handle that is to add "tomcat" in bb-services, and then in bb-hosts I could specify the ports via "tomcat:8001 tomcat:8002 tomcat:8020 tomcat:8009" and so on.

Heh - it wouldn't work the way you want it to, it would probably run
all of the tests but only show one of them (the first or the last)
on the status page.

> The problem is there are not only tomcats, but other apps and services as well (squid proxies, oracle OCM's, and random java servlets) that wouldn't fit under just a "tomcat" column, and I don't really want to add so many columns for these custom apps.

Yeah - I have a "status consolidation" project lined up for the next
version post 4.2. We need an abstraction between a test and a status;
one status may consist of multiple tests, and when viewing the status
you should be able to pinpoint which of the tests actually failed.

> Is there any way to force these remote tcp checks to appear under the "ports" column?

No. What I'd do in your case is to create a TCP test for each port, 
and run all of them as usual. So in bb-services you'll have
   [tomcat8001]
      port 8001
      ...
   [tomcat8002]
      port 8002
      ...

and in the bb-hosts file you'll put "tomcat8001 tomcat8002 ..." on the
appropriate host-entry.

That gives you a lot of columns, and you don't want that. So use the
"group-except" directive in the bb-hosts file to remove these from the
display.

Then, to get a combined display you'll setup a combined test using the
bbcombotest utility. In the bbcombotest.cfg file, add a line with

   myhost.tomcat=(myhost.tomcat8001&myhost.tomcat8002&.....)

This creates a "tomcat" status for "myhost", which is built from all of
the individual tests on the ports. And *that* status is what you'll put
on your display, and use to trigger alerts.


It's not simple, and it does add an additional delay before a problem is
detected (you'll have to wait for bbcombotest to run an update). But
it's the best I can suggest right now.


Regards,
Henrik