AW: AW: Cascading Services/Service hierarchy

Mohr James james.mohr at elaxy.com
Mon Sep 27 17:01:07 CEST 2004


> If you stop to think about it, you'll notice that all 
> services provided 
> in a network requires code to be run on one or another 
> device. Think of 
> a device as a host and you'll be just fine.

I still have problems with the term "device". Being able to access a web
shop is neither a "device" or a "host". However, it is a service. In
most context "device" refers to something **physical**, a web shop is
not physical, but still a service. This is the service we need to
guarentee for our customers. It consists of the web server service and
database services, which then consist of other services and eventually
*physical* hosts and *physical* devices. 

> >  If this is simply the way it is, I can deal with it.
> > I am just curious if that is the way it is.
> 
> It's the way it works in the physical world. Nagios (2.0) let's you 
> abstract this by configuring service groups to help you get a quick 
> overview of all the separate services included in a 
> service-flow (proxy, 
> web-server, loadbalancer, database replication servers, 
> database master 
> server to mention a very common example).

As far as I see, 2.0 is only available from the CVS repository and as
alpha/unstable from a couple of web sites. Is that correct? It's nice to
know what is coming up. Particularly in our case where we are still in
the testing and planning stages. I just want to know is it something
that I can implement now. 

If I undestand you correctly, with 2.0, you will be able to have a
heirarchy with multiple levels. Will the stati propagate, as well?

Although a simple list of all of the services would provide an
"overview", it is not necessarily the best representation of the
services. Being able to represent/depict the services as a heirarchy is
more accurate than a simple list of what is "included in a
service-flow". 


> For an admin, it's utterly unhelpful to get a notification 
> saying "The 
> customer support FAQ doesn't work". This doesn't bring the admin any 
> closer to a solution and the first customer that calls in 
> will tell him 
> the exact same thing. If, on the other hand, he received a 
> notification 
> saying "CPU Load on the customer support load balancer is 100%", he'd 
> immediately know where the problem resides and thus be a good step 
> closer to fixing it.

True, but for reporting it *is** important to know when the "customer
support FAQ" doesn't work. As you say, as an admin, I am not interested
in the fact that the web shop is not accessible. Instead, I want to know
that it is the port on the switch connecting the web server to the DB
server. However, neither my customer nor my boss care that it was a
switch port. They want to know whether we have reached our service
levels or not. 

If we have to sit down at the end of each month and manually add the
outages to a spreadsheet, then TCO goes waaaaaay up for us. So having a
mechanism that allows service stati to automatically propagate up a
hierarchy is extremely beneficial to service provides. In VPO, I know
the top-level is red, thus I know that I am not fulfilling my service
obligation. I can then quickly drill down and see that which services
are affected by the outage and what the root cause is. 

> > Is there any way to create a multi-level heirarchy? Looking at the 
> > status maps on the Netway site, it does look like there are 
> multiple 
> > levels. Is this just the representation of the dependencies 
> or can you 
> > actually create multiple levels?
> > 
> 
> Every network with more than one switch IS a multi-level hierarchy in 
> the physical world. If you've configured things correctly 
> (parents etc) 
> these are the levels you'll see. 

I am aware of that. However, I talking about representing it in Nagios
not what the real world is. As far as I see looking at the "Service
Detail" you only have two levels. The host and then all of the services
associated with that host. Looking at the configuration files and doing
a few tests, I do not see a way of creating this hierarchy. A service
belongs to a host. I do not see a way of saying that service A contains
service B, which contains Service C:

Web Shop -> Web Server -> Physical machine

>From what I see, displaying this kind of hierarchy is not possible, as
you can only display the two levels: host and service. If this is so, we
have to do things differently than before. If it is possible, I cannot
see how.

Please define "correctly" in this context.

> > By the way, what are people using for the 3d status map? I 
> downloaded 
> > the Cortona player listed on the nagios.org site and the 
> maps doesn't 
> > look very good. Any recommendations?
> > 
> 
> Google for it, or fix the statusvrml.cgi program to create 
> prettier vrml. 

Google for what???? I tried "nagios vrml" The first entry points back to
the Nagios site:

Cortona (Parallel Graphics) - Look terrible
Cosmo Player (Computer Associates) - bad link, search by CA found
nothing
FreeWRL -  no Windows binary
OpenVRML - last updated 2001, doesn't look hopeful.

Of the 400+ entries most are not even related to getting the 3D map to
work, just happen to have vrml and ngaios on the same page.  Which do
you use?

Regards,

Jim Mohr


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