Custom Help Desk Screen

[mikew]

Currently I am trying to create a screen for a Help Desk which has specific needs. The company has two kinds of checks:
* checks for production servers which sends notification 24X7
* checks for non-production equipment which sends notification 8x5

This is norml stuff. But what they need is a screen for the Help Desk which only shows the relevant information. For example, they do not want the Help Desk to see anything for non-production outside of 8x5. The Help Desk is just too unskilled to determine if something is production or not. This is a group which is offsite and low cost the organization has implemented. The problem is they are sending requests for 8x5 devices 24x7.

I have considered grouping everything in time groups...so all production in one group and would show problems with that group and a non-prod group. The question is how to get non-prod to only be visible 8x5. The goal is that non-prod should only be visible during the day.

Any ideas?

[abrist]

I am not sure how do this with 1 dashboard, but you could create 2 dashboards, one for 8x5 devices, the other for 24x7 devices. Create new hostgroups for each of these sets and make a unique dash few each set.

[mikew]

So I have been working on this and looking at the backend API. If I could export the services for each host group and then create a script to stop exporting the api for the 8x5 host group outside of the 8x5.

They want one screen, naturally. So it looks like I would need to generate a custom php page depending upon the time of day. Does the API make sense to solve this?

[BanditBBS]

Mike, that's a heck of an idea. If the API would list hostgroup on the service status call, man would that make your export easier. Then your script would be much easier. Wonder if is something they could do, add the variable to list any inherited hostgroups the service belongs to. That way in one url you can grab both or just one hostgroup depending on time of day by just adding the &hostgroup_name= to the url. Without nagios making that API change, in my opinion, using the API seems overly complicated.

Any chance you could modify the op screen code so it only displays the hostgroup(s) you desire? Wonder how difficult that would be.

[mikew]

I have been working on this and the API export could be used to create a screen. The problem is, you would not have links back into the problem checks. I would think that Help Desk is going to click on the problem to get more detail...making the API non workable...at least that is the way it looks.

[BanditBBS]

opscreen doesn't allow click back either. What about birdseye? Can you limit that to specific hostgroups? It allows click back by default. I;m connecting up to work, I need to give that a try and something else I just thought of that is too dumb to mention unless it works.

EDIT: Tried my stupid thought and it didn't work. You can't limit birdseye view either. However, the code looks pretty straight forward if you wanted to give it a shot.

[mikew]

I have a custom opscreen working, it allows click back and looks like it could be modified. I have the hosts divided into hostgroups 24x7 and 8x5 so I can separate them out that way. I just need a way to figure out how to pull both hostgroups during the day and one hostgroup at night.

[BanditBBS]

I have a custom opscreen working, it allows click back and looks like it could be modified. I have the hosts divided into hostgroups 24x7 and 8x5 so I can separate them out that way. I just need a way to figure out how to pull both hostgroups during the day and one hostgroup at night.

Can you just grab the server time in the php and if out of that window hide the one group?

[abrist]

You could use something like the following:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6621 ... rom-server
Then if you are using jquery, just hide the div when outside of the timezone:
http://api.jquery.com/hide/

[mikew]

We actually got this working and it is pretty slick. We are doing some finishing up and testing and will try to make it available for anyone else. We are are looking at a lot of custom stuff as I keep running into customers wanting to make changes so I am in the process of integrating a developer to make this happen. Anyway...everyone thanks for the tips.