[hobbit] purple page grouping & alert acknowledgment

[Tom Georgoulias]

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

> It's the program that generates the status message, that also
> determines how long it is valid. So this is something you set on each
> BB client or extension script. 

OK, that is different than BB, which only needed to have the PURPLEDELAY 
set on the server side, in bbdef-server.sh.

> In such cases there is little Hobbit can do. When you ack an alert,
> you take over the responsibility for that status for the time the ack
> is valid. If you "fix" something without checking that it actually did
> solve the problem, you're asking for trouble.

I've been thinking about this a bit and I cannot see a clean, easy way 
to solve it either.  Having an ack clear each time the status changes 
could be rather annoying, and a complicated set of if/then conditions is 
bad too.  So I've voting for leaving it as is for now.  I trust our team 
to do the right thing and we generally strive to keep things in the 
green anyway.  :)

> If you really want it, it's not a big problem to implement an
> "de-acknowledge" function. It might even be worthwhile for reporting
> purposes, to keep track of how much time your admins are using on
> troubleshooting. I'm open to suggestions.

I can see this being helpful in cases where I'd like to wipe out all the 
various acks for whatever reason and return a system to its normal, 
paging self, but those situations are quite uncommon.  If it's easy to 
implement, I wouldn't mind having it.

Tom