I concur, although let me share my "workaround" to the long amount of
time for a check cycle to complete
I have been using Servers alive since version 2, and over the past 5
years my hostfile has grown to around 2000 checks in total across 10 sites, with
wan speed dictating that some service, disk space and count file checks taking
up to 5 seconds per check. (you do the math)
I've since grown a brain and paired down my entries to around 1450,
removing stupid checks like terminal services, leaving bare essential,
production / workflow affecting checks.
Recently I went through and thought of how I could decrease the cycle
time. All of my disk space checks I have chose now to do every 20
cycles. Service checks against things like server scan service form trend
I run every 20. Service checks which are annoying to us if not running,
although don't affect the user community, eg: exchange sa, I've reduced to
one check every 50 cycles.
Mail queues and information store checks, sure I still run every cycle,
since if these aren't running, my support guys are gonna start getting
phone calls. My scope was if a check fails, and I wouldn't get a call
from users about it straight away, I now only check it every 5
cycles.
By going through all of my entries I got my cycle time down from 20-25
mins to around 5-6 mins. Sure, the first cycle is going to take some time
if the checks are set to start on first cycle, but the return is worth
the bit of time of configuration.
My 2 € cents worth
Peter
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, 17 February 2005 09:52
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [SA-list] Major product checks missing?
Let me throw my proverbial tuppence worth in here. Although I guess that may mean a fair chunk of work for you, my feeling is that the most limiting feature of SA at the moment (and there aren't many!) is the problem of serial checks - i.e. rather than parallel checks. I have the same problem as Greg, as do I think quite a lot of people - my check list (currently only 260ish out of a theoretical 5000) takes about 10 minutes to complete, which means that several quite critical items can get missed for what is becoming an unacceptably long time. I could work around it (just) by running a second copy of SA for hyper-critical checks, but that means another machine, and even then it's pretty clunky.
If this were a democracy (and I appreciate that it's not, Dirk - we exist under your benevolent dictatorship!) I would vote to focus development on this area, even if it meant waiting longer for other features.
Ian
Ian K Gray
OEL IS - European Network Operations
el: +44 1236 502661
Mob: +44 7881 518854
| "Dirk Bulinckx"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 16/02/2005 14:10
|
|
2 threads or 99 threads is the same issue, if we want to do that for all the
checks, it means very simply rewrite the complete checking part of the app.
Dirk.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Greg D. Moore
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 3:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [SA-list] Major product checks missing?
At 08:44 AM 2/16/2005, you wrote:
>Problem is that we can't add everything to SA, that's why we invented the
>external check(s).
Sure you can. You just need an infinite amount of time. :-)
Actually I thought of what I'd call a "compromise" feature I'd love to see.
One issue I and I think others have had with SA is it's basically
"single-threaded" on the checks. So if you have a lot of checks, or worse
you have a couple with long timeouts that have to time out before it can
continue, it can be minutes before critical checks are performed and the
time is not necessarily constant for a run. (i.e. it might normally take 5
minutes to run all your checks, but if you're doing a URL check and have a
30 second time out and a 2nd knock on it, it could take 6 minutes if the
URL is failing, etc.)
Would it be possible to have say 2 threads... so you could split up the
checking a bit more. Perhaps have 5-10 threads that you want to make sure
run every 1 minute or so (real quick things like pings) and the rest run
normally. I'd even be willing to give up dependencies between the
threads. (i.e. a check in thread 2 can't be dependent on an item in thread
1).
I mean ideally it would be completely multithreaded, but I realized how
difficult that really ends up being, so hence this "compromise" suggestion.
>Dirk.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf
>Of Vogl, Tom
>Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 2:39 PM
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: RE: [SA-list] Major product checks missing?
>
>A few reasons:
>
>1) The problem with add-on checks is that they typically require quotes
>around a parameter or two when path names have spaces. These quotes
>screw-up all sorts of logging and web-output that we are trying to use.
>
>If these checks were done natively to SA, the log and web output could
>be much cleaner.
>
>2) Occasionally the external checks we are do fail and the utilities
>used don't handle the problem well (dialog boxes stack up on the screen,
>etc). Build in, SA would handle errors more cleanly.
>
>3) Isn't this something that is so commonly requested (and not very
>complicated) that it only adds value to SA?
>(Stretching I know - but trying. Would really love to see this built
>in).
>
>=tv=
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
>Behalf Of Dirk Bulinckx
>Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 11:14 AM
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: RE: [SA-list] Major product checks missing?
>
>Why not in an addon?
>
>
>
>Dirk.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
>Behalf Of Vogl, Tom
>Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 5:11 PM
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: RE: [SA-list] Major product checks missing?
>
>How about some file-related checks? Instead of depending on COM or
>ERRORLEVEL checks, built-in functions for:
>
> SIZE of specific file exceeding/below x
> COUNT of files matching (parameter) exceeding/below x
> AGE of specific file older/newer than (x
>seconds/minutes/hours/days/months)
>
>Tom Vogl
>Director of Information Technology
>Leed's
>Phone: 866-LEEDS24 x280
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>www.leedsworld.com
>
>Leed's. The Product of Your Experience.
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
>Behalf Of Dirk Bulinckx
>Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 5:37 PM
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: [SA-list] Major product checks missing?
>
>In SA (and add-ons) there are already a lot of checks for most major
>"products".
>Things like
> perfmon/process/service/wins (addon) are typicaly for
>NT/Win2K/Win2K3
> SQL server
> Oracle
> mail (mailflow addon)
> URL (IIS/Apache/...)
> *nix (diskspace/process both as addon)
> ...
>
>Anything "major" that is missing?
>
>First thing that jumps to my "mind" is mySQL ... But that's something
>we're already working on :-) so you don't have to mention that one.
>
>
>
>Other ideas are welcome...
>
>
>
>Dirk.
>
>
>
>
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Greg D. Moore Director of IT [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Powerone Media 1-800-6POWER6 http://www.poweronemedia.com
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