After a day of running in trace and debug modes on the alerts module,
I think I understand how this is broken. But I'm unsure anything but
hacking the code can fix the issue. It appears to be unfortunate
interactions in some of the features, including the "flap detection"
stuff.
So: If I have the rule:
MAIL me (at) whereever.com TEST=disk COLOR=RED RECOVERED
and ALERTCOLORS="red,yellow,purple"
The traces show Hobbit going through the following "thought process":
* Say the disk goes yellow. That's in Hobbit's alert color list, so
it triggers alert processing. But, no rule matches that color, so no
alert is sent.
* Say the disk now goes red. Now, Hobbit sees that as a transition
from an alert state to another alert state. Normally, it would
suppress this, but there is logic to special-case going red, and the
alert processing is triggered. This time, a rule matches, and an
alert is sent.
* Say now the disk goes yellow. This is seen by Hobbit as a
transition from an alert state to another alert state (due to both
colors in ALERTCOLORS). No alert processin is done -- it is
suppressed since it is NOT a recovery (it's flapping between two alert
states). BUT, Hobbit now remembers the current color (alert state) as
yellow.
* Finally, the disk goes green. This is a recovery, since it is a
transition from the ALERTCOLORS to the OKCOLORS. And, this triggers
alert rule processing. HOWEVER, now, the alert code scans for a rule
for the last state of the alert -- yellow. And, of course, no such
rule exists, and the rule that would trigger the recovery page is not
used, and no recovery page is sent.
The RECOVERED keyword is only a flag on the rule that says if you
match this rule during recovery processing, this recip does want a
recovery page. But, Hobbit keeps no memory about which rule triggered
an alert, it seems. It has to go back through the ruleset during
recovery processing to find a rule to use. And because the colors
change, no such rule can exist.
So I think you can call it a bug, or an unfortunate side effect of
adding yellow to the ALERTCOLORS list. If you do, you'll compromise
your recovery paging. If you don't, you can't send alerts on warning
(yellow) conditions. Short of changing the code to eliminate the
alert state suppression (i.e., flap detection),
I'm not certain how this can be fixed or worked around.
-Alan
Mark Hinkle wrote:
Yes, I see the same thing as Alan and maybe that is why his
description makes sense to me.
The real questions are: what triggers a recovery message to be sent
and who gets them? Is it when a test goes from any color to green? Or
is it any "down-grade" in alert state (i.e. red->yellow, or
yellow->green)? It appears to be the former - any color to green. And
that makes sense - "recovery" means everything is ok, and that is
what "green" means.
But that does leave an open question about that state change from
red->yellow. In my environment, different notification methods are
used for "red" than are used for "yellow", specifically sms text for
red vs. emails for yellow.
*And that is where the problem comes in*: if a "red" failed test
first goes to "yellow" before then going to "green", the recovery
message (upon going green) is only sent to the notification
destinations configured for the *yellow state*, not the red state.
I certainly understand how this logically occurs - red->yellow is not
a recovery so nothing would be sent there at all. But hobbit does not
seem to save a complete list of who has been notified for each
"event", so it basically forgets about those folks sent notifications
at the red level as soon as it transitions to yellow. When the test
finally goes green, hobbit checks the alerts config for who would
have been notified at *the state just before green* (in this case
yellow) and sends recovery messages to those destinations. But it has
lost the fact that it was actually at a red level previous to the
yellow and should have sent recovery to those destinations as well.
I believe that BB keeps track of who has been notified for each event
via the "np_user (at) host.com_host1.disk" type of entries in the tmp dir.
This allows it to have a complete list of notification destinations
that it could/can use for recoveries. I am not saying hobbit should
use the same mechanism, but hobbit does *appear* to be losing some
rather important state info.
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