[hobbit] [re-post] xymon notifications

[J Sloan]

T.J. Yang wrote:
> Hi, joe
>
> We are running two xymon servers across WAN network also.
> Here is a brief description how we did it.
>
> 1. xymon1 is the primpary one and xymon2 is the standby one which is dumb(not alerting).
> 2. all the clients send xymon messags to both xymon1 and xymon2.
> 3. on xymon2(standby),
>     1. we have a cron entry to sync xymon1 config files every 5 minutes.
>     2. there is a xymon2 hertbeat server side external module to check the health of xymon1.
>        if xymon1 is head or not healthy, this module will enable xymon2 with [bbpage] section enabled.
>     3. heartbeat server side module will disable its alerting once xymon1 is back online.
>
> So we have a semi-auto fail-over architecture. but we need to take the lost of missing metrics information on xymon1 during its' down time. 
>
>  keeping two xymon server in sync on same LAN is easy using HA/clustering software.
> but keeping two xyomn servers in sync on two WANs far away is not easy. I heard Sun's clustering software has new feature to enable clustering over WANs, but I haven't study this myself.
>   
T.J. - 

Thanks for you insights. Your setup sounds like an engineering tour de force, but our needs are much simpler than that - no cluster is needed in our environment, the redundant xymon servers are providing all the reliability we need and more. In fact, a cluster would be hard to implement since the corresponding xymon servers are in separate networks, hundreds of miles apart.

Our problem with xymon is all the duplicated alerts. If there were some way to get xymon to emulate big brother in this regard it would be ideal.

The ideas posted here so far have merit, but I'm still trying to think through all the options to come up with the simplest way to suppress the duplicate alerts without introducing a new single point of failure.

Joe