[hobbit] grouping methods

[Rich Smrcina]

If this is a situation of routed networks, Hobbit can know about that 
with directives in the bb-hosts file.  If it knows a host behind a 
router is down, it will only notify for the router, not the hosts behind 
the router.

Linder, Doug (SABIC Innovative Plastics, consultant) wrote:
> Sloan [mailto:joe at tmsusa.com] wrote:
> 
>> We've not had a bb server go down in all the years we've been 
>> using it, but sometimes wan connectivity goes away due to 
>> circumstances beyond our control
> 
> This is by far the biggest annoyance we have with all system monitoring
> - when networks go down.  It's a problem with every monitoring tool
> there is and I can't think of any way to solve it: the monitoring system
> has no way of knowing whether a system is down because it crashed or if
> it's down because the network went down.  All it knows is that it can't
> talk to the system anymore and something is wrong, so it generates an
> alert.  When a whole network goes down, it can become hundreds of
> simultaneous alerts.  And that's annoying enough when it's just email
> alerts.  When you use Hobbit to generate cases in your trouble ticket
> system, that can be hundreds of new, useless cases to manually close.
> 
> We don't want to raise the amount of time a system has to be down before
> Hobbit generates an alert, because we want to know as soon as possible.
> But if we keep that number too low, then when the network has a brief
> hiccup, we get hundreds of redundant cases.  This is especially a
> problem with overseas networks on the WAN.
> 
> I think the only possible solution would be for Hobbit to have some kind
> of flood-detection routine built in, where it could tell how rapidly it
> was sending alerts about connection problems for machines all on the
> same network, and was smart enough to think "Whoa, I'm about to send 100
> connection alarms about systems on the same network.... Instead of
> sending 100 of them, maybe I'll just send ONE alert saying "You got a
> big problem here."
> 
> Doug Linder
> 
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> 

-- 
Rich Smrcina
VM Assist, Inc.
Phone: 414-491-6001
Ans Service:  360-715-2467
rich.smrcina at vmassist.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/richsmrcina

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