Re: [Kmon-devel] Begin with the end in mind

[Frank D. <ke...@dr...>]

hi,

>I tried to send this to the list but it doesn't look like it was delivered.
>Did you get it or should I try sending it again?

ah , stupid 40kb limit i changed it to no limit.

> All my college professors said when doing project development one should
> always begin with the end in mind.  So this is what I had in mind.
>
> Target users:  Bad/Lazy system admins.
> I say bad/lazy because if the dude knew what is up he would take the time to
> install nagios (http://www.nagios.org)  But since nagios is rather a pain in
> the butt to install I think we have a large target audience. But I think we
> should always keep simple in mind.

well another group of target users might be people like me that have some 
souper-monitoring daemon running somewhere on a remote machine but want very 
quick feedback/interaction on their desktop when they make configuration 
changes or try to solve a problem... that isn't possible with a webinterface. 
but indeed right.

> As far as what the end user gets I made two quick .ui to try and show what I
> understand the project to be based on the emails.

ok some things:

- you can leave out the hosts tab, since we won't configure hosts from the 
config dialog anymore (at least that was te tought), we would do it a bit 
like in karm: there is an (xml gui) toolbar with buttons like "new host/new 
group/...", and each host/group has a RMB menu with properties..

- we probably want to avoid the kmail-filter-dialog-like design as much as 
possible, because everyone kmon user i know has difficulties with that.
so instead of having a listview + a right pane with properties (like its now) 
we better have a listview + new, edit, delete buttons, and a separate dialog 
box for the properties.

- seems qt designer doesn't support kdialogbase. well no problem, we just 
throw out the buttons (ok/apply/cancel) and make it a widget encapsulated by 
a kdialogbase-descendant ?


> NewSummary.ui shows proposed changes to the Summary page.
> * Tree view of services

yup

> * Change uptime to timestamp.  I ran kmon for weeks at a time and its kind   
of hard to figure out when the last failure was when it says 344:23:12

wow you have a big uptime :) i shutdown my computer every night..

> * I notice most everyone else is not in the US. Unless your cellphone 
service
> providers use the same email format to send text messages as they do here I
> don't think anyone else would be interested in the "US only text messaging
> setup" under Actions. ie mailto:801...@mo...

okay. for alerts we have now a generic class, and i will figure out later how 
to use KNotify for alerts (stuff like playing sound, showing (passive) popup, 
log to a textfile are all done fine by knotify). another descendant of the 
alert would be mon-style alert.d alerts.

another remark: now you represent dependancies by subnodes in the tree. that 
was my original idea too, but we didn't figure out yet what to do here i 
think..

greetings,
frank