Status change and history snapshots - how to force one?

[Everett, Vernon]

Greetings all

Here is an interesting scenario, and I was wondering if there is a feature to cater for this.

We are monitoring a system, and the alert went red.
We acknowldeged the alert, and logged a call with our vendor for a replacement component.
So far, all good.

However, while waiting for the replacement component, we had another failure, which also should have triggered a red alert.
(It's a disk array, with many many disks, and many hot spares, so it wasn't a tragic failure)

The problem, of course, is that since the first alert was acknowledged, nobody spotted the second one, until the first disk was replaced, and the system remained red.
(Somebody did the old "hmm, that's odd" and had a look.)

Also, in the history, there is only one "snapshot" - when the first device failed. We have no history snapshot to show the second device failed.

Is there a way to force a status update/change, even though there is no real colour change?
Is there a way for Xymon to detect that we are looking at a second failure?

If the answer to the above is no, then can we add this to the feature wish-list?

I gave it a little thought, and came up with what I think is a simple implementation.
We could add this an option to bb, similar to the [+lifetime] option, which will force the server to do a colour change from any colour to the new colour, even if they are the same.
This should also clear any acks, and take a snapshot for the history.
Implementing it as an option to bb, will probably require relatively minor changes at server level, and put the onus on the client scripts to decide what should force a change.
But then again, I have no idea what is really involved in this, so feal free to ignore this paragraph. :-)

Regards
     Vernon



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