Re: [GENERAL] Schedule

On 06/20/2017 07:00 AM, Steve Clark wrote:
> On 06/20/2017 09:02 AM, Adrian Klaver wrote:
>> On 06/20/2017 05:35 AM, Steve Clark wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> We have customers whose equipment we monitor. Some of the customers don't run a 24/7 operation
>>> and turn their equipment off when the go home. We need to create a schedule for them of when we
>>> can ignore alerts from their equipment. We use postgresql in our monitoring environment to maintain
>>> alerts and equipment to be monitored. Each piece of equipment has a unique unit serial number so
>>> the schedule would be tied to this unit serial no.
>>>
>>> I would be very interested in what might be the best was to organize a scheduling table(s) in postgresql.
>> Some questions:
>>
>> 1) What happens if someone ignores the schedule and the alert is real?
> That is up in the air for now, probably if our NOC wasn't informed by the customer they
> were working outside of the schedule the alert would be ignored, but then the customer
> would probably call us because something wasn't working.

It might be just me, but looks like a finger pointing exercise in the
making. The classic '(Person 1)I thought you had it. (Person 2)No, I
thought you had it'. The whole idea of ignoring an alert makes me
nervous anyway. It seems that it should be possible to have the
equipment produce an manual off state and the monitoring to acknowledge
that. That being said, see more below.

>>
>> 2) What are the alerts and how many are there?
> Device not pingable, as an example. The alerts continue to be sent to our
> monitoring system, typically at 2 minute intervals, the monitoring system would look at the schedule for that
> unit a decide whether or not to ignore the alert.
>>
>> 3) How is planned downtime during scheduled work times handled?
> They would get a call from our NOC if the unit was down during scheduled uptimes.

Could they not schedule a downtime?

>>
>> 4) Do you want to organize by customers or equipment or both?
> We have one piece of equipment at each customer that monitors one to many devices at the customer.

So when you where talking about unique serial numbers where you talking
about the monitoring equipment only or does that include the monitored
equipment?

>>
>> 5) What is the equipment and do you or the customer provide it?
> We provide the monitoring equipment, we or the customer could provide the equipment being monitored.

My first draft of an idea(I'm guessing some of this exists already):

1) Location/customer table. Not sure if a customer can have more then
one location.

2) Table of alerts and what they mean.

3) Schedule table keyed to location.
To make life a good simpler I would use range types for the schedule:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/rangetypes.html

Then you could use the range type operators and functions:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/functions-range.html#RANGE-OPERATORS-TABLE

to verify whether an alert occurs in or out of the schedule.

What I have not taken into account is whether a location has multiple
schedules e.g. weekday vs weekend. Then there is the holidays issue. Is
this something that needs to be dealt with?

4) Equipment table keyed to location.


>>> Thanks in advance,
>>> Steve
>>>
>>
>
> Thanks for response.
> Steve
>
>


--
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@aklaver.com