"Network services status"

rasqual · Post by **rasqual** » Sun Jan 22, 2006 11:39 pm

This is something I'd really, really like to see.

It's one thing for those of us with technical support roles to have great information coming into our pagers, accessible on the web, and so forth. Works great. But what we're facing now is a need to let our users see what's down, in a web page for our help desk system. In short, if something's down that affects a lot of users, we don't want each of them to enter a ticket in the web form for the help desk! If they could see that it was down on their login page, then they'd know that we're aware of it, too.

While I can think of some ways of doing this, these ways all involve a second tier of dependency-based tests. It could get ugly. But if some future version of Hostmon implemented features specifically with this in mind, it'd be great.

I'm not even sure entirely what kind of features would make this work, but the end result would be output that could be included in any web page, and each service for which status is reported would be abstracted above the test(s) that determine that status, so that users would have less detail and more summary information to go on.

Something like that.

Keep up the good work.

KS-Soft · Post by **KS-Soft** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 3:49 pm

Sorry, I do not understand your needs. Do you need some summary report, like Dashboard report?

Regards
Alex

rasqual · Post by **rasqual** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 4:30 pm

Something like that, yes. Rather than tell you just what I'd like to see just now, though (I'm going to have to think about this), I urge you to consider what a "network and services status page" might look like for users. Hostmon has a lot for I.T. staff, but as far as I can see it would be cumbersome to turn all of our many tests into a simple status page fit to expose users to in terms they could understand.

The idea here is that when opening a trouble ticket in a web form for our help desk application, the first thing they'd see would be this status page. "Ah, Exchange is down, according to this." And instructions would tell them "If this page shows some service down, please do not open a ticket or call the help desk; someone is on it."

Something like that is what I have in mind. Specifics are hard to think about just now (i'm in brush-fire mode today, alas).

Thanks -