[Devmon] devmon/xymon wishlist or feature requests

[taylor l. <tl...@ap...>]

Cross posting to both the devmon and xymon mail lists.

 

The following features for devmon, would in my opinion, greatly
extend/enhance the snmp monitoring capabilities of devmon/xymon.

 

1.       Devmon should be able to poll different devices on different
intervals.  Having a global poll cycle is too limiting.  

For example, there may be a piece of critical SNMP data that you need to
query on a device, but its limited to only one or two MIB objects.  For SLA
or other reporting purposes, you may need to poll every 10 seconds or 5
seconds.  But for most other devices, or devices with large MIBs (Network
switch) every 5 minutes might be sufficient.  Such a setup would allow you
to aggressively poll the devices you need to, while not causing SNMP
responses to exceed the poll time on the other devices.  We run into this
issue now while trying to poll key devices, if we tighten the polling cycle,
we start to get timeouts on our "larger" devices, as the latency over the
VPN connection is a bit high.  If this is something devmon supports, I am
not aware of it, and I've used both single node and multimode (database
based) versions.

 

2.       Devmon should easily support logging any/all retrieved SNMP data to
a database.  I setup the multinode installation and saw the test_data table
in mysql, and was excited as I thought the data would be logged there.
Turns out no, and then after some researching looks like a method was
started to be able to use it, i.e. dbtable.  I downloaded the code from
sourceforge, but was unable to get it to work.  I think better integration
or documentation of this feature would be very nice.  Here the justification
should be obvious, sometimes the RRD graphs aren't sufficient for the
granularity they provide, and having access to your SNMP data in a sql
database can be very valuable/insightful.  Again, if anyone knows how to do
this, I'd love to find out more about how to implement it.

 

Xymon Feature/bugfix requests: (I'm running 4.3.8, so if the following
features are available in a later version, great).

 

1.       After a reboot of the xymon server, any of the disabled devices,
always come back enabled.  These should persist past a reboot.  A reboot
shouldn't invalidate the fact that I've knowingly disabled a device, or if
it does, there should be an option to allow you to select disabled devices
persist after reboot and/or restart.

 

2.       Also, I've noticed  a bug with xymon dates, currently if I disable
an alert and I select say 6 months out, it marks the times as something
nonsensical.  For instance, I currently disabled a few hosts and chose
disable until November 1, 2013, and they are saying disabled until Sat Jun
14, 14:13:44 1902.  At some random time, usually a few days to a few weeks
later, they re-enable themselves, which is annoying.  I just read the 4.3.9
through 4.3.11 release notes, and the 4.3.9 release notes state "Fix error
in disable-until-TIME or disable-until-OK code"  Does this fix address the
same bug I just described?

 

3.       Would like to request a disable/reenable all alerts via one button
on the enable/disable screen.  It should be smart enough so that if you
already have some hosts disabled, then upon re-enabling the alerts those
hosts still have their disable settings applied.  We have some devices we
monitor which degrade in poor weather, and when a big storm comes through it
would be nice to just click one button and halt alerting.