Hi all,
I'm interested in the different ways that people handle alerts when they are
on vacation (holiday in British English)... I'm (still!) migrating from Big Brother BTF (still mostly use that for alerts, Xymon for the rest), and if I
went on vacation, I'd just put 1 line at the bottom of bb-alerts excluding
me from all alerts (as they get SMSed to my mobile) and someone else would get them (as I was never the only one to get them anyway). But you can't do
that in Hobbit / Xymon (as I posted about last year).
So how do you do it, or what do you recommend for a network containing a variety of different machines, routers, O/Ses and services, where the
primary, secondary and tertiary responsibilities for each service may be different people depending on the service - in the case where one of those people goes
on vacation?
A few ways I can think of doing it using features I know already exist:
1. have a distinct e-mail address for each person that receives alerts,
that should only receive alerts and no other e-mails, and then redirecting that address to another person when they go on holiday
and then redirecting back to the original person when they come back
(has the downsides of meaning that the other person gets all their
alerts, even if they are not the most suitable person or getting those
alerts anyway and so ending up with 2 copies of them - particularly
annoying if they are SMSes like we use; another downside is remembering to
put it back when you get back from holiday) 2. going through all the services for which the person going on
vacation receives alerts, and changing them so that they go to someone
else... Has the downsides of the tedium involved in doing it and reverting
it... Might be easier if you have a special macro for each set of changes, e.g. PersonA->PersonB, PersonA->PersonC and PersonA->Person
C is 3 macros... It is easy to change the macro when you get back (if
you remember). 3. following on from #2, I suppose instead of defining macros for each recipient (which is already one layer of abstraction better then the
'default'), you could define a macro for each set of primary,
secondary and tertiary recipients (although that could make quite a few permutations in a large office). Then you just have to change each
of those macros when someone goes on holiday, and then again when they
get back.
4. A custom script, possibly with a database and putting all the
intelligence in there (but that probably doesn't help others here,
unless the script is publicly available).
5. Er, and passing mobile (cell) phones back and forth - leaving your
work mobile with someone else when you have the day off - but that only works if you have a work mobile!
And then there are the ways using features that have not so far been built:
1. being able to define vacations (I know public holidays has been
added to a revent version) for recipients, when they start and when they finish... being able to set a VACATIONRECIPIENT who gets the alert
if the first recipient is on vacation (they will need to not get it if they are listed as the 2nd recipient too) 2. as above, but without the VACATIONRECIPIENT. Instead if one of the recipients is defined as on vacation, all the others automatically shift up in terms of any DURATION> required before sending them an alert 3. having the exclude feature that BB had, but, althought that was easy
to do before going on holiday, it was a poor solution anyway in terms
of handling of alerts 4. some other way... I'm not going to spend too much time thinking of them now when there may be a good solution already! ;)
Kind regards,
SebA
18:34:00