Suggestion: CCM and multi-tenancy

[jsmurphy]

Hi Guys,

Something that's been chafing me lately is the way that nagiosQL creates unidirectional links between objects (i.e If you link a host to a hostgroup you can only view the link from the host side). So if you are linking host -> hostgroup you will never be able to get a list of all the hosts that belong to a hostgroup from the CCM, conversely if you were to do it hostgroup -> host you would never be able to see all the hostgroups that a host belongs to.

The suggestion is to display it bidirectionally, now I understand that doing so creates a brand new conundrum (apart from the challenges it presents in the vast amount of additional CCM coding)... when you write the config files which object is the authoritative source so that you don't end up with a definition that links in both directions and makes Nagios fail to start? The best idea I've come up with so far is to add a section that allows you to configure which object in a relationship is authoritative (so either hosts or hostgroups, contacts or contact groups, so on and so forth). Though this has implications of significantly reducing flexibility and probably requires a bit more thought.

I realise this isn't likely to happen any time in the foreseeable future but the more you start seeing large installations the more likely I think you are going to see this come up.

[SDohmen]

This sounds like an awesome idea. We have a similar problem. What we do at the moment is make a matrix of hostgroups/services/hosts. That way we have a overview. Its not perfect but for now it works.

[scottwilkerson]

Yes, this is a great idea, and we are aware of the current difficulty this can cause on large installations.

I realise this isn't likely to happen any time in the foreseeable future but the more you start seeing large installations the more likely I think you are going to see this come up.

Work is already underway on this project. By no means do I have a date yet, but a CCM remodel is in the works, I've seen a preview and it's, well, awesome...

[mguthrie]

Here, if you guys feel like playing with the current beta, this new CCM installs alongside the existing one as an XI component, so this way you can preview it safely while still having use of the older stable version. I still have quite a few cosmetic tweaks to do, along with a bunch more testing, but many hands make light work, so if you feel like playing around with it, send me PM's of any bugs that you find. ; )

Currently this CCM will indicate host->hostgroup and hostgroup->host relationships any any relevant pages. So if you access a single host config, but it has a hostgroup assignment from the hostgroup definition, that group will be greyed out from the select list to indicate that the assignment already exists. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot more intuitive than the existing version.

[jsmurphy]

I was not expecting that, awesome work guys! I'll see if I can sneak that onto our dev server to have a bit of a play with.