[hobbit] Highlights of the 4.3.0 version

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2007 at 07:16:12PM -0400, Asif Iqbal wrote:
> - Display column only when  it is red
>  (http://www.*hobbit*mon.com/*hobbit*on/2006/08/msg00920.html)

I'll leave that for later. There will probably be an entire new version
with just display things.

> - SNMP trap by default
> - SNMP probe option builtin

Too much for now. I need to dig into the Net-SNMP library API to do
that.

> - Process specific alert
>  (http://www.hswn.dk/hobbiton/2005/11/msg00159.html)

Already in 4.2.0 via the GROUP definition in hobbit-clients.cfg and the
corresponding rule in hobbit-alerts.cfg

> - Comment TAG for DOWNTIME
>  (http://www.hobbitmon.com/hobbiton/2007/04/msg00141.html)

Has been implemented for 4.3.0

> - Add functionalities in `delay'
>  (http://www.hswn.dk/hobbiton/2005/06/msg00272.html)

Haven't looked at that.

> - CPU/Memory Usage per process
>  (http://osdir.com/ml/monitoring.hobbit/2007-01/msg00429.html)

Probably impossible. Most "ps" implementations can report the current 
amount of cpu/memory a process uses, but that's a snapshot (ever noticed 
how "top" always has itself in the top list of cpu-using processes?). 
What's interesting is not how much cpu/memory a process uses exactly when 
the Hobbit client runs the "ps" command, but how much it has used on 
average since the last client run - similar to what "vmstat" reports for 
the system as a whole. I don't know of any way to get this data.

Another problem with this is identifying what a process is. A
long-running daemon often forks child-processes that are short-lived;
should we add their cpu-utilisation to that of the long-running process?
If yes, then we have to monitor all processes that are started (so
running once every N seconds is not sufficient); if no, then you won't 
spot the cpu hog because it was spawned as a child process.

> - Text based alert for `msgs'. Currently it shows as html in my email
>  (http://osdir.com/ml/monitoring.hobbit/2007-01/msg00203.html)

Easily done with an alert script.


Regards,
Henrik