{bb} Dependencies and SMS notifications

[Joonas Makinen <jma@one.sci.fi>]

Hi,

I use Big Brother 1.2b to watch several services and servers. Some on the
local network and some on a different continent. 

The first annoying thing of course was the lack of proper dependencies. A
remote host depends on a) the local network connection (firewall), b) the
routers on the way and c) the network which the remote host is in. I
couldn't figure out a way to do this with grouping and pagelevel GROUP and
still maintain a sensible summary on the web interface. 

Next I ran into problems with paging. I use the SMS paging feature and
would like to be paged once after the host/service has been down for two
minutes (the checking interval is 60 seconds) and then paged if the
problem hasn't been solved in 15 minutes. The recovered page is also nice
- it's useful to know if the problem cleared and how long did it last. All
this should work if I set the pagedelay to ~2-15. Well, for some reason
this didn't send me any pages. I didn't find the problem, but I removed
the ~2 so that the pagedelay would be just 15 minutes. This works for
alerts, but if there's 2 or 3 alerts in 15 minutes of the same host or
event, it sends me just one alert and 2 or 3 "recovered"
messages. So the delay won't work on those. 

I wrote a quick fix to bb-network.sh just for our company to check for a
special dependency file. Basically if host X is down and host Y depends on
it, the host Y is not checked and a "clear" status is returned to BB.

The paging thing still needs to be resolved. I want to get an alert if the
host has been down for 2 minutes and a recovered message after the error
is resolved. If there's a subsequent error of a same kind after the
previous one is resolved, I want to get an alert of that also, no matter
if 15 minutes has passed or no. But if a problem _isn't_ resolved, I want
to get a notification of it every 15 or 30 minutes.

Any suggestions?



--
Joonas Mäkinen   <jma@one.sci.fi>

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