[hobbit] Dependency sytem in Hobbit

[Stef Coene]

On Friday 19 January 2007 15:56, Hubbard, Greg L wrote:
> Etienne -- you are going to have to find someone to write that and add
> it to Hobbit.  Path-based alarm suppression is one of the holy grails in
> the network management industry, and the reason it has not yet been
> solved is because it is a difficult problem.  For small networks you can
> come up with a solution, but if you are using VLANs and WAN's and load
> balancers and all that other stuff it gets to be rather difficult.
>
> There are many commercial software vendors that claim to have this
> problem solved -- but sometimes even their demos do not work.  The
> little bit of dependency specification that you can put into Hobbit does
> indeed work, but not across the board.
As fas I know, the hobbit _server_ can do this for the network tests.  All 
network tests are done in 1 run.  The data is processed and dependencies are 
calculated and errors are generated.

The problem is client checks.  When an error is received, the hobbit server 
needs to check it's dependencies.   But some of these dependencies are also 
client checks that are maybe not (yet) received.  So the server can never 
know for sure if all dependencies are satisfied.

The only way I can imagine this to work is if all checks are send every 5 
minutes.  So, when a red check is received, the server waits 5 minutes untill 
all checks are updated and it can starts checking the dependencies.

But what with checks that are send every hour ?  And do you really want to 
wait 5 minutes?
s

Stef