[hobbit] Hobbit not recognizing certain tests?

[Hubbard, Greg L]

Being familiar with both Netcool and Hobbit, I would never consider
replacing Netcool trap management with Hobbit.  Netcool processes traps
in "near real time" and scales quite large.  Hobbit does not provide
real time monitoring (default is 5 minute samples, with 1 minute screen
updates).  The only scenario where Hobbit might successfully replace a
Netcool system is if you only want to know that *something bad* happened
in the last five minutes, and you don't mind drilling down into a Hobbit
screen to find out what *something bad* is.  You will have to be careful
about how you construct your trap test so it will handle alarm clearing
and won't forget problems.

I am not throwing any rocks at Hobbit -- it was not designed to handle
real-time alarm management.  I *think* Henrik would agree...

With all that said, it is pretty easy to forward Hobbit alarms to
Netcool, and I don't think it would be very hard to forward Netcool
alarms to a Hobbit test -- if you are concerned about a dashboard, etc.

GLH

-----Original Message-----
From: Jacobs, Eric (ThomasTech)
[mailto:Eric.Jacobs at thomastechsolutions.com] 
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 5:05 PM
To: 'hobbit at hswn.dk'
Subject: RE: [hobbit] Hobbit not recognizing certain tests?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: FARRIOR, Andy [mailto:Andy.Farrior at victoriacollege.edu]
> Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 5:30 PM
> To: hobbit at hswn.dk
> Subject: RE: [hobbit] Hobbit not recognizing certain tests?

Andy, wonderful to hear from you. And thanks for your method of getting
snmp traps into Hobbit. It is a bit of a feather in my cap that I can do
so. My boss is anxious to get rid of our highly priced NetCool
monitoring package, but we needed to be able to monitor traps, at least
from our F5 devices.
 
> 
> 
> I haven't modified trap.pl in a very *long* time.  Hmm...  (I'm still 
> using it.)
> 
> 
> Going back over the code, I'm running hobbitdboard so I can get the 
> validtime field for the test:
>   "$BB $BBDISP \"hobbitdboard test=trap 
> fields=hostname,validtime,color\" "
> 
> In case there's a host that doesn't send a trap that often, I wanted 
> to change the color to green instead of having it go purple and 
> generate an alert.  So to get the time left for a test, I needed the 
> hobbitdboard results.  A side-effect is that the column won't appear 
> until the device sends it's first trap.
> 

Yes, I looked again at the code and realized that I was mistaken, and
have already apologized to Henrik for having the temerity to suggest
that there might be a bug in his code.
 
> 
> For the problem device, is the log from SEC showing a hostname or IP 
> address for the device sending the trap?
> 

Yes, but that was sometime ago. Maybe before I made some other
corrections to get things working. I'm tempted to just down a server to
cause a trap.
 
> There may be a problem if it's sending a status message to Hobbit with

> an IP address instead of a hostname.  I don't think trap.pl does a 
> good job (or at all) of trying to resolve an IP address to a hostname 
> that's in bb-hosts.
> 

Yes, I've seen that. In order to get things to work, I've had to make
/etc/host file entries and make sure that the sending devices are
configured to send their traps via certain interfaces so that the IP
address will correspond to the host file address. 

> 
> 
> Hope that helps,
> Andy
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk]
> Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 3:41 PM
> To: hobbit at hswn.dk
> Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit not recognizing certain tests?
> 
> On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 12:43:55PM -0400, Eric Jacobs wrote:
> > The trap.pl uses hobbitboard to find all the hosts that have the 
> > "trap" test defined.
> 
> Bad idea - there's a chicken-and-egg problem here.
> 
> Columns do not appear in the hobbitdboard output until they exist, 
> i.e. a status has been reported to Hobbit. So if *something* must 
> report a "trap" status to Hobbit before the trap.pl script sees that 
> it should do the "trap" thing ... well, I guess you can tell where I'm

> going.
> 
> Scripts that implement custom tests should use the "bbhostgrep"
> utility to scan the bb-hosts file for the hosts that have a specific 
> tag defined.
> 
> There is actually another way it can be done, but it's not yet
> documented: You can send a "hostinfo" command to hobbitd, and it will 
> return a pre-parsed version of the bb-hosts file - one line per hosts,

> with the fields delimited by '|' characters, eg:
> mail.hswn.dk|172.16.10.2|NET:intern|COMMENT:Internal mail
> server|smtp|pop3|imap
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Henrik
> 
> 
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