[rancid] Monitoring rancid poll failures

[Austin Schutz]

I would like to use an alternative to email monitoring of rancid poll 
failures. It would be nice if there were some way of displaying these 
failures alongside other types of alarms.

I have been considering injecting alarms into netcool, which we have 
locally, but I would like to hear what other people are using.

I have taken a brief glance also at nagios, zenoss, and opennms. But 
none of these appear to offer much flexibility when you get past initial 
stages. I don't want something to go out and do network polling, I just 
want to be able to create my own alarms which the interface should do 
intelligent things with.

Also I don't want them doing snmp/other polling of the network, because 
I already have a system in place for that. I want to give <whatever> 
system alarms, and have it do something reasonable with them.

Also, when these systems (nagios, zenoss, etc.) offer the ability to 
generate an alarm in some custom fashion, it is typically possible to 
set a single alarm when something goes wrong, but not to generate 
multiple alarms at once. I would like to have one alarm for each device 
which rancid can't poll.

In fact, I would like to not only send <whatever> rancid alarms, I would 
also like to use it for catching alarms from other applications I 
babysit/develop.

How are other people managing this?


Austin