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Re: [hobbit] Acking alerts without the ID

Henrik Stoerner wrote: 
On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 02:31:03PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:

With Hobbit you have to enter the alert ID which was sent out in the notification email. The problem with that is we have many people who only watch the web page, or the just plain don't want to have to go to their email to cut and paste and alert id, especially for multiple alerts.

Is there any chance that Hobbit will have a more user-friendly Ack mechanism soon?


Yes, it is in the works. Version 4.2 - currently in alfa - already has it for the new "Critical systems" view.

This change also introduces a new concept of acknowledging alerts at
different levels of the organization. An ack done by the team monitoring
the critical systems is a "level 1" ack; it won't stop any alerts from going out, but it will get the status off their webpage. Techs can acknowledge an alert as "level 2" - it stops alerts from going out to
people on their level, but doesn't prevent alerts from escalation to
higher-level people (managers and such). Getting this into the alert
module takes a bit of work, which is why 4.2 will only have the
limited support for the "Critical systems" view.

I'm still somewhat undecided about whether to keep the ack ID for acks
done by e-mail; when ack'ing something off the webpage you can require
user authentication for the webpage. For e-mail acks some sort of user
authentication is needed, and the ack ID is a kind of token which
provides this. So I'll probably keep the ACK id for acks that arrive
through paths other than the web.


Regards,
Henrik


Attached is a temporary ACK-code web page solution you can try until Henrik finishes. It's not great but should do OK for people who don't
use e-mail. It builds a web page table from the hobbitboard output.
The table gets embedded in a frame of the current acknowledge alert page. The table lists the hostname, check and ACK codes. Cut and Paste the ACK code you want to acknowledge, enter your text message, select the time and send.

John



Here is a how-to for a temporary ACK-WEB page to use until Henrik finishes the plans he has for acknowledging alerts. This should work for 4.1.2 and 4.2. on Debian and Solaris. nawk is the only requirement that I can think of being a problem on some OS's.

1. Copy the attached ack-html.sh script to $BBHOME/bin. (NOTE: If you run bbcmd first it should setup the variables for you to follow in this README.)
2. Make it executable. chmod 755 $BBHOME/bin/ack-html.sh
3. Add the following to the end of $BBHOME/etc/hobbitlaunch.cfg(Check the ENVFILE path and adjust the time INTERVAL to your preference): 

[ack-html.sh]
        ENVFILE /home/hobbit/server/etc/hobbitserver.cfg
        NEEDS hobbitd
        CMD $BBHOME/bin/ack-html.sh
        LOGFILE $BBSERVERLOGS/ack-html.log
        INTERVAL 10

4. cd $BBHOME/web. Backup acknowledge_form.
5. Edit acknowledge_form. Goto Line 28. It should be "</FORM>".
6. Insert the following after "</FORM>" and before "</CENTER>"(Adjust height= and width= to your preference):

<FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica" COLOR="silver">
<!-- OBJECT data="/hobbit/ack.html">
Warning: /hobbit/ack.html could not be embedded.
</OBJECT>
</!-->
<p>
<IFRAME src="/hobbit/ack.html"  height="40%" width="50%"
             scrolling="auto" frameborder="1">
  [Your user agent does not support frames or is currently configured
  not to display frames. However, you may visit
  <A href="/hobbit/ack.html">the related document.</A>]
</IFRAME>
<p><A href="/hobbit/ack.html">Alert ACK Codes</A>
</FONT>

7. Restart hobbit. 
8. Check for errors in $BBSERVERLOGS/ack-html.log.
9. Do some ACK testing.
10. Refresh page as needed.

Thank Henrik for the flexibility to do these things.