The workaround in #2 may help you out a bit (with the notification
behavior in the last beta if you set alerts on the member probes
rather than the group & fiddle to make the names helpful you'll get
meaningful messages), but answering the "Which Child triggered this
alarm?" question is cleaner from an end-user perspective.
Re: Groups & Notifiers (and speaking a bit to #1 below), I'm still
puzzling out the notification semantics for probe groups since I
didn't really get to play much until yesterday. It seems to be "Group
then Member Probe" independently, so if a notifier is configured for
both you get two messages (haven't installed the final release yet but
this was the behavior I saw in the last beta).
I'm not sure if that's a bug or not (should it be "Group || Member
Probe", "Group && Member Probe", or is the independent double-
notification behavior desirable in certain situations?). Also if the
"or" behavior is right how do you handle a notifier on a member probe
that's not also on the group?
My gut says the "or" behavior is correct (with notifiers on the group
implying every member probe) and it should always send the notifier as
if it came from the group device (with an indication of which member
triggered the alarm), but I'm not ready to say that with any level of
conviction yet...
I suspect this all ties back to how groups/member probes are
implemented: Looks like the contents of a group are first-class
devices as far as notifiers know, and all the prettying-up I can think
of comes down to making the Notifier logic to do special things if the
triggering probe is in a probe group which is potentially ugly from a
coding standpoint...
-MG
On Apr 9, 2009, at 11:34 AM, Tony Mumm wrote:
After having now put more of this into production, I have to agree
that your
RFE #3 below is essential for probe groups to be usable. We didn't
run into
that scenario on our test devices as we didn't see many outages.
Our NOC gets disproportionately concern when the relatively low
priority
member probes are triggered. In our case, the NOC thinks the
entire router
is down when its not - just a single BGP session.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael
Graziano
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 4:29 PM
To: InterMapper Discussion
Subject: [IM-Talk] InterMapper 5.1b5 (3 RFEs)
Loving the new probe groups -- only a couple of minor issues popping
up with them and they're all just annoyances. (I'm a bit late to the
party so apologies if these are already known/logged) --
1)
Adding a new probe to a probe group inherits the map's default
notifiers (which may not match the probe group's notifiers).
This isn't an issue in my setup because my notification lists are dead
simple, but I think the sane behavior for more complex environments
would be to inherit the notifiers from the probe group rather than the
map.
Related: Updating notifiers on a probe group doesn't affect the
notifier values for contained probes, but a good case can be made for
that behavior being sensible.
2)
You can't change the label of a probe contained in a probe group
(there's no "Format..." menu option for member probes in the group's
info window), and the automatic name is usually less than helpful (eg.
named with an IP address). Ungrouping, renaming & re-grouping seems
to be a workaround for now.
3)
Notifiers can say which probe group you're a member of, but not which
of your members triggered the notifier. (This can sometimes be
inferred by the Condition field, but having an explicit item would be
helpful).
Ideally I'd like to be able to have notifiers of the form "<Device
Name> (<Group Member>) - <Device Status>" (e.g. "ldap.ny (LDAPS) -
Alarm") which gets me all the info I need in one quick scan.
-MG
On Apr 1, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Janice Losgar wrote:
Folks:
A new beta-test version of InterMapper 5.1b5 ("False Pony") is now
available. We would be delighted to have you use it and send us
comments and
bug reports. It contains some minor enhancements and a few bug
fixes. Please
see the Release Notes for a complete list.
- Condition strings set for okay thresholds in the <snmp-device-
thresholds>
section of SNMP probes are now displayed in the status window.
- Fixed an overflow bug in computing percent errors on an interface.
- Fixed potential crash when ungrouping items from a probe group on a
duplicated map.
- Double-click in a chart will automatically attempt to get the edit
lock if
needed.
- Fixed a problem where the InterMapper DataCenter installer would
stall at
100% complete, on some systems.
New Features in InterMapper 5.1:
- Probe Groups: Group a number of probes for an IP address into a
single
icon.
- SMS notifiers allow you to send SMS notifications directly to a
cell phone
using a cellular (GSM or CDMA) modem, rather than relying on TAP or
email
gateways.
- Google Earth integration: InterMapper can supply device
information as a
layer to Google Earth.
- Grid Layout: There's an Arrange -> Grid layout option that lets
you place
icons into an m x n grid.
- Command-line import and export of maps through the RemoteAccess GUI
- Insert Icon places a non-probed icon or image on the map
- Server Log preferences that controls the number of lines in the
scrollback
- Global Device List Actions: More actions are available in for
devices in
the global device list.
The major feature of InterMapper 5.1 is Probe Groups. A Probe Group
allows
you to:
- Group a number of probes for an IP address into a single icon.
- Add new probes to an existing Probe Group.
- Ungroup the icons (individually, or all the members).
- Poll each member probe at its own rate, with its own settings.
- Reflect the most serious condition of all the member probes in the
icon's
color.
- Get notifications when the entire group has a problem.
- Get (separate) notifications when a member probe has a problem.
- Handle dependencies - if the "Control Probe" is down, no
notifications
will be sent for any other member probes.
- Show SNMP device and interface information based on the choice of
the
Control Probe.
For a complete list of new features, please visit the "What's New"
page and
read the Probe Groups tech note. You'll find links to both further
in this
message.
OTHER NOTES:
Warning: Since 5.1b5 is still beta-test software, it is not
recommended that
you use it in a production environment. In addition, InterMapper 5.1
uses a
new file format which is not backwards compatible with InterMapper
5.0. For
this reason, we recommend that you do not install InterMapper 5.1
beta
releases on your primary InterMapper server; install it on a
secondary
machine and work with a copy of your InterMapper Settings folder. We
have
provided a test serial number on the download page that you can use
for an
entirely separate installation. If you do wish to install it on your
production server, please backup your InterMapper Settings folder
prior to
upgrading to 5.1b5.
Having said all that, we deeply appreciate your willingness to try
out these
beta versions. Your feedback gives us a lot of insight into the
problems of
people who manage real networks. Thanks again.
The InterMapper Team
PS. Why "False Pony"? Well, all of our customers love the traffic
"ants".
With over 1,500 species of ants in Australia, we figure that we'll
never run
out of code names... http://www.ento.csiro.au/aicn/name_c/a_1487.htm
LINKS:
Download:
http://dartware.com/downloads/binaries/?release=beta
Release Notes:
http://dartware.com/downloads/binaries/intermapperbetarelnotes.html
What's New:
http://dartware.com/network_monitoring_products/whatsnew51.html
Probe Groups Tech Note:
http://dartware.com/support/tech_notes/assortedtopics/
probegroups.html
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