One problem at my shop is that some of the less-technical staff
are often the first to see the Mon alerts, and they don't always
understand what they mean.
Here's an idea - have fields in the config file like:
downmessage "Web service is broken! Call Morris now!"
upmessage "Web service restored"
That the various alert scripts (and mon.cgi) could use to better
explain what's going on. The existing "comment" field could work
too, though it's a bit limited.
As an alternative to this, how about a syntax in mon.cf that
would let us stuff arbitrary variables into the mon structure?
Like:
service ftp
depend SELF:inetd
interval 5m
monitor ftp.monitor
var downmessage "Production FTP has failed, fix it now!"
var upmessage "Production FTP is back"
Also, those of us writing little adjunct scripts to mon could use
this to pass parameters or whatnot. If an extension turns out to
be useful, it would be easy to "mainstream" it later.
-- Ed
