[Nagiosplug-devel] New threshold syntax - changes

[Max]

After working with a living larger system with 10-12 Nagios
configuration users / developers, I am coming around to Richard's view
as well.

We have made very memory efficient and process efficient APIs /
frameworks to use with nagios for writing remote checks in perl using
Net-SNMP or a custom perl agent I wrote, but in the end what our users
want and use that most is what is 1) easy to use 2) quick to implement
and 3) minimizes the amount of hard-coded configuration work in the
shared nagios configuration tree.

At our company, one of our teams' jobs is to make our nagios instance
as self service as possible; many of our users are experienced SAs who
have not used Nagios before, so we try to make our thresholds easy to
read and use; I would not want them to have to use this very succinct
but hard to remember notation.

We have moved forward with a bash like notation:

-w metric1,gt,10:metric1,lt,20:metric2,eq,14

we default to 'or' logic but would be easy enough to add and if it is
requested .. has not been yet so i am not going to implement that
until it is wanted.

I know my notation was slammed on list for a number of reasons and
that is fine :), I am not suggesting it as a Nagios standard,  but it
is easy for our users to pick up and remember, it is implemented in
the module Nenm::Utils which is available online.

So I am all for having guidelines but after working with a larger
group of nagios users / developers I have changed my point of view ..
easy to learn and remember and use with more typing is better than
succinct and short to type as far as maintainability, accessibility,
and wide acceptance.

- Max