[Xymon] Bug - xymon man page shows data parameter incorrectly

[Henrik Størner]

On 20-04-2012 18:10, John Horne wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In Xymon 4.3.7 the 'xymon(1)' man page shows for the 'data' message type
> the arguments as:
>
>      data HOSTNAME.DATANAME<newline><additional text>
>
> As far as I can tell this should be 'HOSTNAME.TESTNAME'.

I don't think so. The difference between a "status" and a "data" message 
is precisely that a data-message does not result in any test-status 
column appearing on the Xymon display, so "DATANAME" is just that - an 
identifier for the type of data inside the data-message. It could be the 
output from some test - but if you test something, don't you want it to 
show up as a status on the webpage ? And if so, then you would use a 
"status" message instead of "data".

"data" messages are commonly used for e.g. performance metrics like 
network traffic counters, various data from "vmstat" and so on. I 
wouldn't think of those as "tests" - they're just data.

So I think that calling it a "testname" would be misleading.


Regards,
Henrik