[xymon] Managing who gets alerts - shifts and rotations

[Elizabeth Schwartz]

We have  people in five time zones reporting to three different
supervisors/team leads, with shifts staggered for maximal coverage.
Today we have 25 permutations of folks on duty, and the company is
growing fast, so the complexity is increasing. We need some sort of
way to allow the team leads to enter shift descriptions, that we can
keep separate from the paging rule sets. We've also got many hundreds
of servers, and people are screaming for more sophisticated rule set
management, but with BB we've got to duplicate 25 shift rules for each
new change - and then modify each set whenever anyone moves around.
Xymon makes the rules easier to *read* but doesn't lower the count.

If we have to write this tool, we will. If it lands on my plate, I'll
set up a spreadsheet that saves as a CSV and write a perl program to
parse the spreadsheet (if I fail to enlist someone who can do a GUI).
But  I'm still really hoping that someone somewhere has already done
this! We can't possibly be the first to need this. And I'm a huge
believer in trying to find code before starting from scratch.

My ideal program would have a web interface with 24x7 blocks and the
ability to put who's on call into each block, allowing for multiple
entries. Then the back end would set up the mail aliases or .forward
files for tech on duty, oncall, backup (and be smart enough to know
that if there's no tech on duty, go straight to the oncall)

thanks again for any thoughts
Betsy