[hobbit] Highlights of the 4.3.0 version

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 01:15:27PM -0400, Scott Walters wrote:
> I am definitely in the "monitor only" camp.

Me too. For those who feel differently, Hobbit does provide the
necessary hooks so you can trigger actions from some status going red;
either through alert scripts, or from the bb "query" command which
others have mentioned. In fact, I implemented the "query" feature
because I needed it to setup such an automated recovery for one of
our customers at work.

> All of those "operational" aspects aside, I've convinced myself from a
> security point of view, corrective action from monitoring is bad-- a
> clear violation of the separation of duties.  You don't want your
> auditors "cleaning up" the numbers as they go over your books.

Good point.

> The question I have yet to answer satisfactorily is,"Should
> the monitoring system perform additional data collection after
> specific errors?"  For example, running a particular "find" command
> when disk usage increases to try and identify which files are causing
> the partition to fill.

It can be very useful at times, especially when you have to do a 
"root cause analysis" to explain why some service was down at 2 AM in
the morning - and the problem was fixed by a 2nd-level technician who 
just rebooted the box. That's why I added the feature that Hobbit saves
the latest client-data report when a status goes yellow or red. It has
helped me track down the cause of quite a few service outages.


Regards,
Henrik