[hobbit] Checking process longevity

[Coe, Colin C. (Unix Engineer)]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] 
> Sent: Monday, 4 February 2008 6:18 PM
> To: hobbit at hswn.dk
> Subject: Re: [hobbit] Checking process longevity
> 
> On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 08:20:42AM +0900, Coe, Colin C. (Unix 
> Engineer) wrote:
> > I'm trying to work out how I can get hobbit to alert me 
> when a process
> > has existed for more than n seconds.  This is important as 
> we sometimes
> > have NFS problems that cause processes such as df to hang 
> due to stale
> > mounts and I'd like tp pick these up sooner rather than later.
> 
> Wouldn't it be easier to just scan the logfile for NFS timeout errors?
> 
> Hobbit doesn't track the lifetime of a process, and I would think this
> would be very bothersome to setup because you'd have to exclude long-
> living daemon processes.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Henrik
> 

By default, under RHEL (most of) the files under /var/log are owned by,
and only readable by, root.  I'm still deciding whether or not to allow
hobbit to read the log files.  I do think that there are other cases
where monitoring how long a process exists is useful.

I was thinking that this could be done by adding a new flag to 'PROC' in
hobbit-clients.cfg.  Something like:

PROC processname minimumcount maximumcount color [TRACK=id] [TEXT=text]
[RUNTIME=seconds]

Example, alert if a 'df' has existed for more 60 seconds

HOST foo
	PROC df RUNTIME=60

I started hacking but my C fu is weak.

CC


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