On Friday 19 January 2007 15:56, Hubbard, Greg L wrote:
Etienne -- you are going to have to find someone to write that and add
it to Hobbit. Path-based alarm suppression is one of the holy grails in
the network management industry, and the reason it has not yet been
solved is because it is a difficult problem. For small networks you can
come up with a solution, but if you are using VLANs and WAN's and load
balancers and all that other stuff it gets to be rather difficult.
There are many commercial software vendors that claim to have this
problem solved -- but sometimes even their demos do not work. The
little bit of dependency specification that you can put into Hobbit does
indeed work, but not across the board.
As fas I know, the hobbit _server_ can do this for the network tests. All network tests are done in 1 run. The data is processed and dependencies are calculated and errors are generated.
The problem is client checks. When an error is received, the hobbit server needs to check it's dependencies. But some of these dependencies are also client checks that are maybe not (yet) received. So the server can never know for sure if all dependencies are satisfied.
The only way I can imagine this to work is if all checks are send every 5 minutes. So, when a red check is received, the server waits 5 minutes untill all checks are updated and it can starts checking the dependencies.
But what with checks that are send every hour ? And do you really want to wait 5 minutes?
s
Stef