[Xymon] White icons and ping

[John Thurston]

Take a look at the 'NOCLEAR' tag.


>     Controls whether stale status messages go purple or clear when a host is down. Normally, when a host is down the client statuses ("cpu", "disk", "memory" etc) will stop updating - this would usually make them go "purple" which can trigger alerts. To avoid that, Xymon checks if the "conn" test has failed, and if that is true then the other tests will go "clear" instead of purple so you only get alerts for the "conn" test. If you do want the stale statuses to go purple, you can use the "noclear" tag to override this behaviour.
> 
>     Note that "noclear" also affects the behaviour of network tests; see below. 

and from the net-test section notes:

> Some network tests depend on others. E.g. if the host does not respond to ping, then there's a good chance that the entire host is down and all network tests will fail. Or if the http server is down, then any web content checks are also likely to fail. To avoid floods of alerts, the default behaviour is for xymonnet to change the status of these tests that fail because of another problem to "clear" instead of "red". The "noclear" tag disables this behaviour and causes all failing tests to be reported with their true color.
> 
> This behaviour can also be implemented on a per-test basis by putting the "~" flag on any network test.


The upshot is, when ICMP ping fails you can have the rest of the hosts 
go 'clear' or go to their actual color. Tests like HTTP could go red, 
but tests like DISK will probably go purple rather than red.

I didn't know about the '~' modifier until I read that today.

--
    Do things because you should, not just because you can.

John Thurston    907-465-8591
John.Thurston at alaska.gov
Department of Administration
State of Alaska

On 12/13/2017 12:54 AM, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
> AFAIK, there is no option for that behavior.
> 
> Without the "dialup" tag, if the ping fails, the others in time go purple (unresponsive)...unless perhaps some firewall has changed, and the systems are reachable (so that other tests succeed) but pings are being blocked.
> 
> With the "dialup" tag, it's not actually an error for a system to not be up and/or reachable all the time, so if the ping fails, the other columns go clear (white outline or solid white, depending on how long the status has remained unchanged).
> 
> So for instance my laptop is tagged as "dialup", as are VMs I don't intend to have up all the time - still useful to have health checks such as for disk space when they are up and reachable.
> 
> Not sure why you'd have the other columns going white if the "dialup" tag is not present for that host in hosts.cfg.
> 
>> On Dec 13, 2017, at 02:46, Pierre L <pierre.lapha at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I have build a nice monitoring solution with xymon but there is one thing I would like to modify but I did not find the option (if it exists).
>> Is there a way to avoid white (clear) icons when the ping is down? I mean, when a server is not reachable, the ping icon is red and all the other get white.
>> I would like to have all the icons in red, to correctly show the urgency of the problem!
>>
>> Any help would be appreciated.
>>
>> Pierre
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> 
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