RE: [xymon] How do *you* handle Xymon alerts when you are on vacation (holiday in British English)?

["SebA" <spa (at) syntec.co.uk>]

SebA wrote:
...

I pre-wrapped my e-mail to 80 characters but something wrapped it to fewer 
characters and messed up my formatting, so here it is again, hopefully more 
readable!

Hi all,
 
I'm interested in the different ways that people handle alerts when they are

on vacation (holiday in British English)...  I'm (still!) migrating from Big

Brother BTF (still mostly use that for alerts, Xymon for the rest), and if I

went on vacation, I'd just put 1 line at the bottom of bb-alerts excluding 
me from all alerts (as they get SMSed to my mobile) and someone else would 
get them (as I was never the only one to get them anyway).  But you can't do

that in Hobbit / Xymon (as I posted about last year).
 
So how do you do it, or what do you recommend for a network containing a 
variety of different machines, routers, O/Ses and services, where the 
primary, secondary and tertiary responsibilities for each service may be 
different people depending on the service - in the case where one of those 
people goes on vacation?
 
A few ways I can think of doing it using features I know already exist:

1.	have a distinct e-mail address for each person that receives alerts,

	that should only receive alerts and no other e-mails, and then 
	redirecting that address to another person when they go on holiday 
	and then redirecting back to the original person when they come back

	(has the downsides of meaning that the other person gets all their 
	alerts, even if they are not the most suitable person or getting 
	those alerts anyway and so ending up with 2 copies of them - 
	particularly annoying if they are SMSes like we use;  another 
	downside is remembering to put it back when you get back from 
	holiday) 
2.	going through all the services for which the person going on 
	vacation receives alerts, and changing them so that they go to 
	someone else...  Has the downsides of the tedium involved in doing 
	it and reverting it...  Might be easier if you have a special macro 
	for each set of changes, e.g. PersonA->PersonB, PersonA->PersonC and

	PersonA->Person C is 3 macros...  It is easy to change the macro 
	when you get back (if you remember). 
3.	following on from #2, I suppose instead of defining macros for each 
	recipient (which is already one layer of abstraction better then the

	'default'), you could define a macro for each set of primary, 
	secondary and tertiary recipients (although that could make quite a 
	few permutations in a large office).  Then you just have to change 
	each of those macros when someone goes on holiday, and then again 
	when they get back. 
4.	Er, and passing mobile (cell) phones back and forth - leaving your 
	work mobile with someone else when you have the day off - but that 
	only works if you have a work mobile!

And then there are the ways using features that have not so far been built:

1.	being able to define vacations (I know public holidays has been 
	added to a revent version) for recipients, when they start and when 
	they finish...  being able to set a VACATIONRECIPIENT who gets the 
	alert if the first recipient is on vacation (they will need to not 
	get it if they are listed as the 2nd recipient too) 
2.	as above, but without the VACATIONRECIPIENT.  Instead if one of the 
	recipients is defined as on vacation, all the others automatically 
	shift up in terms of any DURATION> required before sending them an 
	alert 
3.	having the exclude feature that BB had, but, althought that was easy

	to do before going on holiday, it was a poor solution anyway in 
	terms of handling of alerts 
4.	some other way...  I'm not going to spend too much time thinking of 
	them now when there may be a good solution already! ;)

Kind regards, 

SebA
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