[Xymon] Hierarchial alerting

[Phil Crooker]

Hi All,

I'm just in the process of converting our old big brother monitor to
xymon. I had a look at zabbix, nagios, groundworks, and pandorafms and
found too many quirks, cruft and gotchas (plus the problem of open core
systems). I returned to the bb clones and found xymon is not only active
and maintained. I must say Xymon is a well thought out, well executed
step beyond big brother, well done, Henrik. 

Is there a way to have a hierarchy for alerts? For example, say we have
a branch office with a print server, file server, router, switch, etc. I
have a xymon entry for each (and multiples for each, ie poll the ftp
port on the file server as well as just the conn monitoring). If the WAN
link to the site dies, I get alerts for all the above, where as I should
really just get one alert for the router. Or if the file server dies, I
shouldn't get both ftp and file server alerts, just the server.

I know this wasn't available for big brother and can't find anything in
xymon. Does this exsit and/or has this been considered? 

For our big brother system, I created a  perl script daemon that reads
in the allevents log to create a "stateful" table of all monitored
items. I also have a text file table of the relationships between the
monitored items, using tabs:

core_switch
         wan_router
                 site_router
                         site_switch
                                 printer
                                 server
                                          ftp
         bbd_host
         local_server
                 smtp
         user_subnet_switch
                 printer

This table is read into a hashed array, the allevents log file is
tailed to keep the state table current and the script awaits queries.
When an alertable event comes in, this daemon is queried by the alert
subsystem (using another perl script), the daemon checks to see if any
parent items are in a red state, if so the alert is discarded.

This is effectively just a plugin and could be more efficiently done if
integrated into the bbd. In terms of config files, having to maintain
two files is not ideal. Currently the host listing and web layout are
effectively combined in one file, so adding a hierarchy as above would
be tricky. Perhaps a second "#" with the parent following, ie:

            1.2.3.4        hostname.domain.com        # smtp dns #
core_switch.domain.com

Anyway, this is just an initial query about this issue.

thanks and regards, Phil