Re: [snips-users] Notifier vs sniplogd question

[Joerg Mertin <mertinj at europe psi.com>]

Hi Mark,

almost right. I use snips 1.1 - but I noticed the following to apply.
The snipslogd notifies everything that has something to do with the event you 
configured to trigger the execution of external script.

This means - the snipslogd is going to notify: info <-> critical, warning <-> 
critical, error <-> critical etc. It will notify events in both direction.

The snipslogd starts the notifier command using the "-" sign as argument, 
telling the notifier to handle STDINPUT only - the notifier script beeing 
started by cronjob does a timely preconfigured job and handles only the events 
that happened for a prespecified time, b.e. 1 hour.

Regarding on what the snipslog daemon does - I think, anyone correct me if I'm 
wrong, write the logs/* files, and if enabld the rrd-file data.

So - to make a long story short:
1. Notifier started by cron is notifying everything for a prespecified amount of
   time.
2. Notifier started by snipslogd handles only device-lines that are passed to it
   through snipslogd, enabling the user to have a more fine grained capability
   of monitoring special devicenames, e.g. company-critical customer b.e.

The only drawback I find using snips the way it comes out of he box is that it 
has to heavily be adapted to easily monitor about 2500 devices... Especialy the 
updates-file stuff should be rewritten - as it has a big problem in old snips 
aka. 1.0 and 1.1 (don't know higher version). The following should be done for 
both version: got the updates informations written to a database (done that).
Implement a locking mechanism for updates-writing (1.0) plus for genweb.cgi (in 
1.1) to not generate web-pages during a monitor-reload - as it erases some 
entries while the log-file synchronization takes place.

Cheers

	Joerg

Mark Ching wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I've recently installed Snips 1.2beta2 (yesterday)  I've configured a 
> few monitors and have been trying to figure out how the notifier and 
> snipslogd work together for notification of downed services
> Could someone ensure my sanity and let me know that what I'm 
> seeing/thinking is right?
>
> So far this is what I understand.
> Notifier.pl is the script that sends an email or page, but only when an 
> error hits the critical level.   Then sends every hour if configured.  
> It doesn't send a notification when the service/machien/etc comes back.
> snipslogd on the other hand more like a syslogd.  It captures output on 
> port 5354 and writes to log files configured in snipslogd.confg.   And 
> can be configured for piped commands.
>
>
> Here is where I have gotten myself completely confused.  Do the Notifier 
> cronjob and syslogd piped command work mutually exclusive of each other?
> So if you just want to know when things change state, then you should 
> only use snipslogd?
>
> Mark


--
Joerg Mertin                                 PSINet Europe
Business Process Automation Group Manager    Rue Fritz-Courvoisier 103
Phone: +41-32-967 52 00                      2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds
E-mail: mertinj at europe psi.com               Switzerland
	*** check the BPA-Pages: http://bpa.etc.psi.com ***