[xymon] Feature: Grouped Non-green view

[Francois Claire]

Hi Henrik,


Sorry but I have to reply to your mail:

Le 08/12/10 08:32, Henrik St??rner a écrit :
> The nongreen page ("bb2" in the older versions) is a bad idea,
> in my opinion. Trying to fit every non-green status into one single
> page might work if you have a very small setup, but it just
> doesn't work at the datacenter level - e.g. right now I have
> 3575 non-green statuses split over 2650 hosts. And that's a normal
> Wednesday morning. I stopped generating the nongreen page a long
> time ago.
>

In my opinion the non green page is the best feature of xymon :-)

This is what makes this monitoring system so useful on production 
networks compared to software like nagios or HP openview. These 
classical monitoring software just gather all events, raise tons of 
alarms and at the end you don't have a global view of the state of your 
services and there's so much alarms (either critical or not) that you 
can't guess if something is wrong or not.

The non-green view is giving to network controllers the overview of all 
the monitored services on a single page, and this is great: the 
background color indicates the global status of your services. Now the 
hard part is to keep this page green and this is a challenge for system 
and network engineers:
- they need to think about the importance of alarms and don't report 
events which aren't a threat for the service
- they have to setup the hosts monitoring properly including filters on 
the logs to monitor only useful stuff
- when a red alarm is generated they need to react by either fix the 
root cause of the problem in order to not let it happen again or reduce 
it from red to yellow or even remove it completely

During the time engineers are fixing the problem, the controllers can 
disable the alarms and the non-green view isn't polluted with those red 
alarms anymore.


In the end having a monitoring system with such a constraint implies 
good IT work rules and the service benefits from that. We're monitoring 
a quite large network and guess what: our nongreen view is most of the 
time green !  :-)
When it goes red the guys are reacting fast because they know it's serious.

> Even for a small setup it quickly becomes unmanageable, because
> an event-log entry from a Windows server will (nearly) always
> make the non-green page go red.

Such messages should be treated: either fixed on the windows server or 
filtered-out on the xymon server so that they don't appear anymore.

> So there are no enhancements planned for the nongreen page.

Fine. Keep it like this it's perfect.

> If anything, I would like the static HTML pages (those
> generated by xymoongen / bbgen) to entirely disappear and be
> replaced with dynamically generated pages. Then we can start
> discussing how to configure what they should look like, and
> in the end we may end up with something that you can configure
> to work the way you describe :-)

Maybe you could do both: keep the static pages and add dynamically 
generated pages ?

>
> Regards,
> Henrik
Regards,
Francois.