Hi, my company uses wug to monitor availability of remote devices for
alerting of outages.  It works pretty well and I know we're only using a
small percentage of what wug can do.  In the never ending battle to justify
the existing of the network support staff we're being asked to report on
network hardware uptime.  We have the 8.0 version although it's not
installed yet and we're running on the previous release

Using the mib-2 sysuptime variable seems like an obvious choice to me and
I'm sure other folks out there are doing something like this.  I could do
something as simple as polling sysuptime daily and make sure it adds up to
what it should be but there's got to be a better way to do it.

The things I see as variables that need to be accounted for are

- how to account for planned maintenance, I'm not measuring downtime but
uptime

- how to group devices by relative importance, like core vs. access layer
devices.  I'm more concerned that the core has 5 9's worth of uptime

- do acts of god like power outages get counted against the hardware's
uptime

- do acts of stupidity get counted against the hardware's uptime

- how to manually forgive the downtime caused by either of those and report
on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis

- how often to poll the uptime, once a day won't work and minute by minute
seems like it might be overkill, maybe every ten minutes is the sweet spot

- we already have alerts setup for equipment availability and we don't want
to change that process significantly.  So this needs to be done in addition
to what wug does currently.  The box it runs on has plenty of spare
horsepower.

I envision a weekly process where we create a report that lists the uptime
for a list of devices, then going over the specific causes of downtime and
perhaps forgiving some of them for example "that switch was down for 10
minutes because some doofus pulled the power cord.  It wasn't a device
failure so we'll forgive that period of downtime" then the total for the
week gets recorded in some way that it rolls up into monthly and yearly
totals.  I think it has to be weekly because people forget the reasons why
things happened quickly and we have a weekly on-call rotation that lends
itself to debriefing what happened in that time frame.

I'd like to hear how other companies have gone about this type of reporting,
in return I'll report on the final product to the list if it ends up that
wug can be used for this purpose, perhaps in concert with another product.

thanks in advance,
dave h



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