I absolutely agree that in some circumstances, a timeout is a down. I’m 
sure you would also agree that in some circumstances, a timeout is not 
necessarily a down. My preference is that the person configuring Servers Alive 
decide what to do with a timeout and what to do with a down. Perhaps a checkbox 
on the alert screen would make configuring timeouts versus down easier?

 

 

Regards,

 

Brett

 

From: Servers Alive Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Dirk Bulinckx
Sent: Saturday, November 30, 2013 1:31 AM
To: Servers Alive Discussion List
Subject: RE: [SA-list] Enhancement request - differentiate between down and 
timeout

 

I understand the request, but as you already said it yoursefl the feature you 
want is already in the product.

Also how to dfiferenciate between a timeout that is a real timeout and a 
timeout that is a real down?

For example in some cases a ping to an host that is down will result (talking 
about what you would get at the commandline)

 

 

Pinging x.y.z.aa with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

 


=> is this down or a timeout?


 

 

 

Dirk Bulinckx 
Servers Alive - http://www.woodstone.nu (http://www.woodstone.nu/) 
StellarDNS (DNS Hosting) - http://www.stellardns.com 
(http://www.stellardns.com/) 

 

 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



From: Servers Alive Discussion List [mailto:[email protected] 
(mailto:[email protected])] On Behalf Of Hanson, Brett
Sent: Friday, November 29, 2013 10:01 PM
To: Servers Alive Discussion List
Subject: [SA-list] Enhancement request - differentiate between down and timeout

I get a fair number of false alarms due to timeouts. In my opinion, not getting 
a response in the allotted time window doesn’t necessarily mean the check 
is down, and I don’t want a service restarted just because Servers Alive 
had some network issues.  

 

For instance, I have two instances of Servers Alive running.  The first 
instance does all the real work. The second instance watches the first 
instance.  To do this, it is looking to see if the log file has changed in the 
last 30 minutes (file properties check looking for the youngest matching file 
write date being more than 30 minutes ago). Both instances are located in the 
same data center, the first instance is a physical machine, the second is a 
virtual machine. A few times a day, the second instance will alert that Servers 
Alive Application is DOWN (ERR: didn't stop within the given timeout). The 
timeout is set at 15 seconds. In this case, a timeout doesn’t mean that 
the first instance of Servers alive is down, it just means that the second 
instance couldn’t figure it out.  The last thing I want is for the first 
instance of Serves Alive to restart and lose its state because the second 
instance decided “I’m not sure, so I’ll say it is down”.

 

I am aware that you can use the “When the Extra info field” on the 
alerts, but it just seems messy and prevents you from using the extra info 
field for more interesting uses.

 

I would like an enhancement to Servers Alive that would treat timeouts as 
possible down or possibly available, or as a completely different condition. 
Ideally, you could have alerts specifically for timeout conditions, or (what 
I’d really like to see) have a different check called if a timeout 
occurred.

 

Thank you,

 

Brett Hanson

Systems Analyst

Agrium Inc.

 

 
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