[hobbit] Some thoughts about alerts, acks and escalations

[Stuffle, David]

Henrik Stoerner wrote:
> I'm beginning to look at the issue of escalating alerts.
> And I've had an idea that I'd like to get some feedback
> on before I go ahead and implement it. 
> 
> Right now, Hobbit doesn't handle escalating an alert. When
> someone receives an alert message, they can ack it - when
> they do, all alerts stop and the item disappears from the
> "Critical systems" page (the NK page).
> 
> BB has the concept of escalating an alert, meaning that
> some recipients of an alert will get the alert message
> even if the alert has been acknowledged. 
> 
> 
> What I'd like to have is the BB system with a finer
> granularity. A recipient in the hobbit-alerts.cfg file
> has an associated "level", default is 1.
> 
> I want our NOC guys who do nothing but stare at the NK
> page 24x7 to be able to acknowledge an alert - and that
> just gets it off their monitor, it doesn't stop alerts
> from going out. A "level 0" acknowledgment - this is just
> to log that a trouble ticket has been raised for the
> issue. 
> 
> A technician (who is a "level 1" recipient) can
> acknowledge the alert he receives - this will stop alert
> messages from going out to other "level 1" receipients,
> so all of the engineers can concentrate on doing what
> needs to be done. 
> 
> Alerts will still be sent to recipients who are "level 2"
> and above - these are the equivalent of the BB
> "escalation" alerts. They can ack the alert if they'd
> like to turn off more alert messages, of course.
> 
> You can have even higher levels if you like, probably
> going up the hierarchy of managers. I don't think we'll
> using more than the 3 levels I've described, but there is
> no reason to impose any limit. 
> 
> 
> Does that sound like it would be useful?
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Henrik
> 
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I like it too.  Would there still be a way to ack an alert which stops all
alerts to everyone?  This way your saying, "I see the alert and I know it's
not a problem, so don't alert anyone else in any level."  

Similarly, sometimes I would like to say, "I see the alert, but I can't do
anything about it right now because I'm on the golf course, so stop alerting
me, but continue alerting everyone else, even people in my same level."

Would the recipient levels be set per host?  I may be level 1 on one host
but level 3 on another.

Somewhat related, one big problem we have is being able to mail ack an alert
from a cell phone.  When you reply to the message it doesn't keep the
subject.  But I believe it puts the ack code somewhere in the body.  Could
Hobbit search the body of the message for "Hobbit [xxxxxx]"?  I don't think
I've heard anyone else with this problem, am I missing something?

Thanks Henrik.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Stuffle                       dstuffle at deltafaucet.com
Delta Faucet Company                (317) 571-4301


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