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Off on a tangent ([hobbit] conn alerts based on ping time)

Jeff,

That's a very good point. Do you know if anyone has documented setting up MRTG with Hobbit? I searched the mailing list archives and didn't find anything concise.

I will probably end up recommending and implementing the MRTG solution, but I still think it should be trivial for hobbit to alert on the ping response, since it already collects that data. I guess a real solution would be for hobbit to come with an MRTG module "out of the box" so that users didn't have to delve into the knowledgebase and/or depend on places like deadcat to find and provide the functionality they need.

I myself don't mind using external scripts and having to tinker with something to get it to work the way I want, but its hard enough to sell management on Hobbit over commercial and well known tools like Nagios, without having to reveal that you need to spend a day downloading external scripts and making them work in order to get the functionality that they expect (and that they think that the commercial tools already have).

I believe that a well-setup hobbit monitor is superior to Nagios and other tools I have tested and been forced to use over the years. But the fact that a lot of the application-specific monitoring (mysql, oracle, postgres, etc), as well as traffic monitoring (MRTG) is handled by third-party scripts that you have to meld into your server probably scares away a lot of people, especially management types who have security folks whispering in their ear to never trust third-party modules and especially not code written by "joe-user from some website" (a manager actually said that to me once). As of yet Hobbit does not even have a fully functional client (no logfile parsing), so we have to use either the bb-client or the bb-msgs script....more third party plugins.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, I guess what I'm saying is I would like to see Hobbit come with built-in support for monitoring common applications and services (besides the basics). It's already partway there as Hobbit can natively check things like mysql, but what about postgres, oracle?

Henrik is a busy guy I am sure, and he probably doesn't get much compensation for all the fine work he does on Hobbit, nor does he ask for any (I did buy him one of his wishlist items, I hope others do as well). As far as I know, Henrik has nobody helping him, except for seeing him mention someone was working on a new Hobbit client. Maybe what we need is more people to roll up their sleeves and write some modules that are compatible with hobbit with little or no tweaking. Sadly I'm no C/C++ guru, but I am pretty good with Perl :-)

I think also perhaps we need an "official" repository of scripts that work with Hobbit, so when someone needs an addon, they can grab an already Hobbit-ized one, instead of going to deadcat and getting a script to hack on. Also a Wiki might be handy, so that Hobbit users can easily share and update information on various Hobbit setups and problems.

Okay, I have written WAY more than I intended here, I'm so far off topic now that I will edit the subject line as a warning :)

-Charles

Jeff Newman wrote:

Really, honestly, im not trying to belabor a point here, but you need to be careful as the ping only runs every 5 minutes, so even if you could get this alerting to work, the link would have to be slow during a ping cycle. So it could possible be slow for 4 minutes, recover, and the page wouldn't happen, as the ping time would be ok. Assuming the client saw the slowness during those 4 minutes via other methods, they would then question why hobbit didn't see it.
Same thing hapens to me with spikes in network traffic between polling periods, I don't see them.
With MRTG, you can shorten the time to 1 minute. MRTG integration with hobbit isn't too hard, so thats probably the route you should go.
-Jeff


On 1/13/06, *Charles Jones* <jonescr (at) cisco.com <mailto:jonescr (at) cisco.com>> wrote:

    Deal, Richard wrote:

    Sounds like they need to through in MRTG and go red when the
    traffic is high on the link.

    And then throw in things like

    bb-ospf.pl to check that ospf is not flapping over the link

    bb-xsnmp.pl to check out the routers at each end and the interfaces

    Yeah I'm aware of the existance of bb-mrtg.pl, although I have
    never set it up.  I guess I was hoping that Hobbit could natively
    support ping testing rather than having to install mrtg and hack
    stuff in.  Its sort of confusing for a newbie when you are showing
    them the ropes of Hobbit and start bringing external scripts into
    the mix (especially ones that require modifying before they will
    work).



    you can also use http to a reliable server on the remote side as
    part of the link test.  Just make the http test for the link
    dependent on the router and the conn test to the web server.



    That won't work in this case as all of the companies servers are
    in a CoLo, Hobbit is running at the CoLo, and they want to test
    the T1 link at the office from the CoLo (there are no servers on
    the other side of the office T1 to do a test against), and even if
    there was, it still would not give them a heads-up to the T1 being
    slow/saturated, as Hobbit only alerts when the conn test outright
    fails.

    -Charles





    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    *From:* Charles Jones [mailto:jonescr (at) cisco.com]
    *Sent:* Friday, January 13, 2006 1:01 PM
    *To:* hobbit (at) hswn.dk <mailto:hobbit (at) hswn.dk>
    *Cc: * crimson (at) technologist.com <mailto:crimson (at) technologist.com>
    *Subject:* [hobbit] conn alerts based on ping time



I'm helping someone set up Hobbit at their company, and they want
to monitor the status of a remote office T1 link. Of course
Hobbit can tell them if the link goes totally down, or you can
ignore bad pings with "badconn", but they want to know when the
link is *slow*, as they often have periods of time when the pings
are not dropped, but instead taking 1-3 seconds (instead of
<100ms like normal). 

    Is there any chance that Hobbit will soon support comparing the
    ping replies to specifiied values for green, yellow, and red?

    Somethign like:

    1.2.3.4 <http://1.2.3.4/> myhost.com <http://myhost.com/> #
    conn:200:500

    This would make myhost.com <http://myhost.com/>'s conn test go
    yellow if the ping was between 200 and 500ms, and red if it was
    over 500ms.
    Since hobbit already graphs the numeric values of the ping
    replies, this seems like it would be fairly easy to add?

    -Charles