[Nagios-devel] The sad side of version 2.0 - serviceextinfo

[Paul S. 0. <Smi...@cp...>]

Okay, love Nagios, been using it since 1.0beta something, and now I'm
implementing version 2.0.

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I love the speed of the new version, the instant host search is superb,
but what happened to the serviceextinfo?

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It's now verified as it's loaded, which is a good idea and sadly a lot
of work for me, I have long lists of hosts that don't run a service but
had an serviceextinfo entry for convenience. My fault, I'll clean it up.

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So, into my observations:-

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1) Redundancy. Now we have:-

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define service {

            use                               generic-service

            host_name                    MyHost

            service_description       This is my service

            check_command           check_nrpe!check_my_service

}

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define serviceextinfo {

            host_name                    MyHost

            service_description       This is my service

            notes_url
http://mynotes/ThisIsMyService.html

}

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WHY!

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IMHO, the serviceextinfo should be merged into the 'define service'
command, so all I really needed is:-

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define service {

            use                               generic-service

            host_name                    MyHost

            service_description       This is my service

            check_command           check_nrpe!check_my_service

            notes_url
http://mynotes/ThisIsMyService.html

}

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Obviously, to make things backward compatible both methods should be
allowed. This could also be applied to the hostextinfo, but as I only
have 130 hosts and 4000 services, my emphasis is on the service side of
things.

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2) Meaningless icon_image. Now we have a notes_url and an action_url,
why do we only have a single icon_image? Shouldn't there be a notes_icon
and action_icon?

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3) Drill thru. In the old version, clicking on the icon displayed
against a service in the "Service Status Details" used to execute the
notes_url, now it takes you to the extinfo.cgi. I guess this is because
we have a notes_url and an action_url so we don't know which to go to.

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4) graph_url. Now that we have multiple URL's against a service, why not
add the one everybody wants, a link takes the user to a graph of the
service. I am not suggesting that the base Nagios system should offer a
graphing facility, just the chance to list a URL to it.

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5) More icons. Taking points 2+3+4 into account, I would like to see an
icon for each URL defined appearing on the "Service Status Details"
display, etc. I think I am in favor of dropping icon_image and having a
default icon for notes_url, action_url and graph_url. Obviously, I am
suggesting that clicking on the icon takes you thru to the URL.

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Your comments are welcome.

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I would love for Ethan (or another skilled Nagios developer) to just
agree to all this and a day later we have 2.1b1 available. It would take
me awhile to familiarise myself with all the code to be able to do this.

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PS: In my hacked 1.2 code, all acknowledge critical alerts shows in
lylic instead of red, takes your mind off them and onto the important
ones, but this should probably be done by the new web interfaces coming
for Version 3.x

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Paul



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