Highlights of the 4.3.0 version

[Henrik Stoerner]

In another thread, someone asked about what new features are planned for
version 4.3.0. I've summarized them below; they have all been
implemented by now. Some of them have been contributed by others over
the past year - I'm pleased to have finally gotten their patches merged.

There are some open bug-reports, and the plan now is to try and get
those fixed. Once that is done I'll ask you all to start testing the
beta-versions, and then a new release is hopefully available soon.

This doesn't mean that I won't consider adding new stuff before the
4.3.0 release, but right now the plan is to get 4.3.0 shipped with
the current set of features. But if I've missed someone's favourite
patch or feature request, do let me know.


Major new features
------------------
* PAGE setting for alert- and client-configuration handles hosts on
  multiple pages, so any pagename can be used.
* Flap detection of statuses that change color rapidly. The status
  is kept at the most critical level until it stops flapping.
* Holiday support for alerts, including variable holidays (Easter etc)
* Split NCV support - graph data from NCV can be split into multiple
  RRD databases allowing for varying number of datasets.
* RRD database parameters are now configurable (i.e. number of 
  datapoints stored, whether to store min/max values etc). Note that
  this only applies to newly created RRD files, not existing ones.
* Distributed worker modules allow sharing the load across multiple
  Hobbit servers
* RRD updates are now cached for up to 30 minutes before being written
  to disk. This makes the I/O load on large installations much lighter.
* Detection of statuses that are reported by multiple hosts
* Client backend-support for the z/OS and z/VSE clients by Rich Smirna

Display things
--------------
* Graph zooming now limits the lower/upper bounds of a graph (requires
  rrdtool 1.2.x)
* The trends page default data-period can be configured to something
  other than the default 48-hour view, and the user can select a
  different period on-the-fly.
* Hosts can be sorted automatically on the overview webpage with a
  "group-sorted" group definition.
* NOCOLUMNS setting in bb-hosts let you suppress certain columns on
  a per-host basis
* Host-comments are displayed as tool-tips, to save screen space.

Checks and graphs
-----------------
* Network tests can use a specific source IP instead of the default
* The validity-period of network tests is configurable, instead of
  being fixed at the default 30-minute setting
* Client file checks can check for a symlink
* "trends" report for RRD handling allows generating custom-made
  RRD files
* Hobbit host- and status-counts are tracked in an RRD file

Miscellaneous
-------------
* NCV reports can handle color-icons before the name:value data
* hobbitlaunch tasks can be configured to run on certain hosts only
* Time-warp detection and warning
* Local unix-socket interface to Hobbit daemon
* hobbitd_capture can collect several statuses and hand off such a
  batch to an external command
* Support for SHA-224/256/384/512 digests


Regards,
Henrik