Re: RFC - advice actually - on availability reporting for management/PHB

Hi Sir,

I am not sure whether I have really understood your
concern.
But would like you to know that currently I am working
on scripts to write all log data to a MySQL DB. This
is necessarily being done to built up a Problem
Management facility around NetSaint using a DB.

>Please would you comment on
>1 How helpful or otherwise you think this approach 
>may be
>
>2 How to update the DB with the interval for which 
>the node was
>unavailable (yes, the DB is really only acting as a
>file store but one
>that is accessible to authorised users from their Win
>desktop, and that
>provides simple queries).


Regarding SLAs and downtimes, my experience suggests
that an end-user is just not satisified with knowing
the downtimes and uptime percentages. He/She will want
to also know the reasons for the various downtimes.
This is very imperative when it comes to understanding
SLAs. Also the resolution factor is of utmost
importance.

As of now, NetSaint limits itslef to showing the
uptimes and availability in numerical terms.

What I am trying to achieve is, to built uptime pages
and associating them with the comment logfile, which
can be used by a NOC (N/w Operations Center)to add
updates. 

This all will be done using,
1.The perfdata option in NetSaint (wherein all data
generated byt the NetSait plugins will be written to
another logfile. The DB will not access the NetSaint
logfile, which by default will be a subset of the
perfdata logfile, but will read its data from this
large logfile)

2.The coments.log file will be read by the DB on a
regular interval.

3. When the uptime is generated using seperate cgis
and this DB, the dowtimes will be associated to the
comment.log file (any comments keyed in for a link,
during its downtime will be associated with that
downtime)

3. Also, putting it vaguely, a different config file
for SLAs needs to be defined, which the DB and cgis
will lookup for while generating uptime reports.

Regarding updation of the DB, it can be done in almost
realtime, by creating timestamped logfiles
(23102002.hostname.txt) and making the DB update
itslef regularly( this can be defined using a perl
script to parse data from txt file to the DB and
running it through shell - cron jobs)
This will also avoid read write access violations if
any, when trying to read from NetSaint's logfiles.



Warm Regds,

Amol Sapkal
Operations Engineer
GTL Ltd., Mumbai

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