[hobbit] completely confused

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 02:03:31PM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:

> So just for clarification, before I start, I need to install the BB
> Client for the OS level reporting to Hobbit.  This is not the Hobbit
> Client and if not, what is the Hobbit Client for?

The Hobbit client is a replacement for the BB client; however, it is
still a very new piece of software, and currently supports only
OpenBSD.

It is obviously annoying that Hobbit relies on the BB client to do
some of the monitoring, but things take time ...

> I have had success in Hobbit enabling one of my apps and it works very
> well.  Only issue I see is that if the app takes a powder, Hobbit Server
> needs to alert me quickly.  I am still looking for the "Time to Purple"
> parameter.

The way you control when the status goes purple is to set a lifetime
for the status when it is reported. Your application sends in a status
report that begins

   status www,foo,com.mytest green ....

This gets the default lifetime of 30 minutes - meaning that it will
stay green for 30 minutes, or until a new status update arrives. If
you want it to only stay green for e.g. 10 minutes, then send this
instead:

   status+10 www,foo,com.mytest green ....

The "+N" means that the status is valid for N minutes; after that it
goes purple. It is normally used to prolong the lifetime of a status
report, but you can shorten it as well.

>  Any help there would be great.  I am going into a meeting on
> Friday and will propose that we "Hobbit Enable" 10 or so of our "key"
> applications.  Our CEO has bought off on this and so it is just a matter
> of getting engineering to buy into it as well.  This will enable our IT
> staff to respond very quickly to application failure.

Sounds great :-)

> That will take care of about half of our remote monitoring needs.  As
> for the other half, I am still looking to deploy BB-Central, but looking
> at the scripts, it looks pretty tightly tied into BB so I am not sure
> how successful I will be with that.  I will begin this task after I get
> my Hobbit server reporting CPU, disk and such.

Let us know what problems you run into.


Regards,
Henrik