RFE: Virtual Contact

[Bishop, Dean]

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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