[hobbit] grouping methods

[Everett, Vernon]

Separate team, separate page(s). 
Look up PAGE= in the hobbit-alerts man page. 
Saved me a lot of pain.

Cheers
    Vernon

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim McCloskey [mailto:tm at campnerd.com] 
Sent: Friday, 13 June 2008 11:31 AM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: [hobbit] grouping methods

Looking for some thoughts and experiences on how folks have configured
their systems.  Mainly in regard to classification/grouping of servers
for alerting purposes.  I'll try to keep this short.

Currently I'm running a total if 3 hobbit servers, each in a different
data center.  Each server monitors clients local to his network in
addition to each of his partner servers smtp box, etc.  This all works
fine.  However, our alerting system, which also works fine is overly
complex and contains too many opportunities for bugs.

In a nutshell, we have 3 groups of sysadmins that rotate on call every
nn interval.  Each group may be involved with a number of systems in
each location and some of the admins will work on multiple Operating
Systems.

I'm looking for a way to avoid having specific alert rules for each
server (lots of text, even with regex macros/vars). 
More to the point, I want to categorize the servers based on a sysadmin
group then the rules can be considerably less complex.
Dividing the alerting on OS categories does not work well as some of the
admins are cross platform folks.
Dividing the alerting by page does not work well as the same 'page' may
contain servers belonging to one or more sysadmin groups.  The 'Class'
statement for bb-hosts seems like a possibility, however I think the
intended purpose is more related to whatever logs are defined in
client-local, so I don't think that will work beyond log files.

Ideally I'd like to define the sysadmin group in the bb-hosts file but I
don't think this is possible.

In summary, if I maintain immense configuration files with somewhat
repetitive data Hobbit works quite well.  I'd like to reduce the
complexity but maintain the functionality.  Maybe its not in the cards,
or maybe - and I am hoping this is the case - I missed some cool flag or
config setting.

Thoughts?





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