RFE: Virtual Contact
Bishop, Dean
dean.bishop at tcdsb.org
Tue Oct 29 22:27:11 CET 2002
i agree with Jim here, it is imperative that any of the features that are to
be made available to joe contacts are available through the web interface.
i am at a site where there are no linux techs just windows guys. It also
adds an interface to deal with and requires additional management (user
accounts, etc).
just my 2cents; keep the change,
dean
-----Original Message-----
From: Carroll, Jim P [Contractor] [mailto:jcarro10 at sprintspectrum.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 2:26 PM
To: 'Jonathan Rozes'; 'nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net'
Subject: RE: [Nagios-users] RFE: Virtual Contact
Jonathan Rozes wrote:
> Why not just have a script rewrite/replace your
> contactgroups.cfg file and
> restart nagios as needed? It would be a lot less complex than
> adding a bunch
> of calendaring junk to the package. You could achieve the same result
> rewriting/replacing timeperiods.cfg.
Interesting thought. My objections to this:
- there's no web interface
- to build the web interface, I'd need to know html/cgi (which I haven't
touched in years)
- to dovetail the web interface to Nagios would require munging the
left-side menu; this isn't an entirely bad thing, but would possibly need to
be redeployed after an upgrade to Nagios (ie, code deviation, maintaining 2
codebases instead of 1)
> I'm not sure of the usefulness of a "send a message" option
> either. Why not
> just send email to the person?
It's less an issue of sending e-mail so much as sending a msg to the
person's pager/cell phone. Granted, we could do that now if we each
separately maintained our own Contacts in Outlook. (We don't have admin
access to Exchange.)
Using Nagios, a concerned user could see that a host is down, click a
related link, and type something like, "This has been escalated to Sev 1 -
please join the bridge at 555-1212."
> Resolving who is on call right now could easily be done as
> well using an
> external script, or if you want to see it in nagios, a plugin
> that simply
> culls the info out of the config file and returns OK with the
> name of the
> current contact(s).
I've already got a solution today. It's a character-based menu which does
some file juggling using /etc/aliases and :include: files. The admin logs
in as the generic user, changes who the on-call admin is, the new contact
gets an informational page like, "You've been assigned the on-call for the
BlaBla group."
But, the solution is crude, and requires that the user have an SSH client,
and prior knowledge of where to go.
With a web interface, someone who perhaps didn't receive proper/complete
training can click a link and say, "Oh, this is useful," and go from there.
Much like many of the useful features I've discovered in Nagios.
Again, this is nothing more than a 'blue sky' wish list. That's why I
started off with "RFE" and not "how can I do this".
jc
> jonathan
>
> +++ Jonathan Rozes, Manager, Information Technology, Will
> Vinton Studios
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Carroll, Jim P [Contractor]
> [mailto:jcarro10 at sprintspectrum.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 8:55 AM
> > To: 'nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net'
> > Subject: [Nagios-users] RFE: Virtual Contact
> >
> >
> > (As if the leads didn't already have enough to ponder....)
> >
> > I was wondering if it would be possible to have the following
> > Request For
> > Enhancement in a future release of Nagios:
> >
> > 'Virtual Contact'
> >
> > Features:
> >
> > - a VC (Virtual Contact) could be assigned to a real contact
> > - this VC would (most likely) be the first to receive the
> pager/e-mail
> > notifications
> > - users who could change who the VC is assigned to would be
> > restricted to a
> > 'VC group' (perhaps this would simply be a matter of adding
> > the VC to the
> > same contact group)
> > - depending on permissions, a user could send a short (120
> > character) msg to
> > the VC (or to any user, if this makes sense) from the web
> > interface; this
> > msg would go to the pager, to e-mail, to SMS... whatever's
> > defined for the
> > VC (/user)
> > - optionally (via config files) a user could determine who
> > the VC resolves
> > to
> >
> > I'm not sure how many organizations out there have a rotating
> > "on call"
> > admin, but this is the case within my group. A feature such
> > as the above
> > would be useful. "Blue sky" wish list, of course. ;)
> >
> > Food for thought.
> >
> > jc
> >
> >
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> >
>
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