Availability report calculations

[Andreas Ericsson]

Ahoy coders in general, and Ethan in particular.

avail.cgi doesn't try very hard to logically calculate actual 
availability when things turn out to be indeterminate.

For the examples, we have the host h and its associated service s.

If h or s is 100% indeterminate (not enough archives backtracked to find 
an actual log entry), but has a state other than PENDING it would follow 
logically that the host has been in its current state the entire time 
and it should thus be presented as such (this doesn't hold true if 
Nagios goes up and down, but in those cases it's just plain ridiculus to 
try to find correct timings for the host).

If h or s has partly indeterminate time the above obviously doesn't hold 
true, since it can come from several different statuses. A possible 
solution would be to log two entries each time a state-change occurs; 
One entry with the timestamp of LAST_STATE_CHANGE and the status it had 
then and one with the current state and the current time for timestamp. 
This increases the volume of the logs slightly but in a decently healthy 
network it shouldn't be so so much as to get unmanageable.

This way, one can also get rid of the then-redundant questions for 
"assume initial states" and such in {trends,avail}.cgi which would make 
life a lot easier for novice users.

To do things properly, one would ofcourse add logic to only log the 
previous state if the log has been rotated since last state change. That 
won't be too cumbersome and it will prevent a day of network turmoil to 
log tons more than it has to.

Before I get down to business; Does this sound like a good idea? Would 
such a patch (assuming it works properly) be committed?

Ethan: Hope to hear from you soon.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer


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