On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 09:15:42PM -0400, Tom DeReggi wrote: > > This automagically happens when your script to automagically update > > Nagios removes accounts which are marked as inactive. > > Be careful with that idea. Automating that almost killed us. The > reason is that sometimes you may want to disable monitoring on > an account that is live, because it may be temporarilly down or > temporarilly getting false alarms. There were times when we'd have > 10-15 alarms disabled manually. The problem then is that when you > automate a global corss refference between billing and monitoring, it > re-enables all teh accounts you wanted disabled temporarilly. Then you > spend 30 mionutes re-disabling the account, if you can remember which > they are, as you get reminders all niught long when you get it wrong.
Then you need a field in the billing system to mark that host to be generated with a notification period of "none", if you are using Nagios. Then the automation does what you want. I'm a firm beleiver in a few hours of programmer time being cheaper than on-going annoyances. I just can't always convince management of that. You could have a simple SQL report e-mail everyone who needs to know about which hosts have notifications disabled each day, if you are disabling the notifications in the billing system. Then if something goes boom, you just look at the list which was e-mailed to you last night. That daily report could also help to remind you that you need to work on those hosts, if that is why they are disabled. > I'm for automation, but no automation should check all the monitors > and auto change. The automation should be on an account by account > basis only. You dont want the automation to mess with accounts that > are not the one you are specifically working on. You don't specifically say you are using Nagios. Perhaps your monitoring system doesn't work the same. In my Nagios setups, we can schedule downtime or acknowledge the problem in Nagios while we are working the problem, and as long as their hostname doesn't change in the Nagios configs, the notifications for those hosts should not be re-enabled. That metadata is retained in Nagios as long as you don't change the hostname in Nagios. We add and remove hosts to/from Nagios all the time without losing the metadata of the hosts with unchanged hostnames. -- Scott Lambert KC5MLE Unix SysAdmin [email protected] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
