Scheduled Service Downtimes

Pandora FMS has a system for managing scheduled service downtimes. This allows alerts to be disabled during service downtimes by deactivating agents.

Generated downtimes will be listed in order of creation date. For a quick search in a long list, you should use filtering by one or more criteria: downtime name, group the downtime belongs to, dates (only applicable for searching downtimes executed Once), execution type, agent, and module.

It is recommended for agents and modules to be selected for the new scheduled downtime to be added after it was created.

Notable fields in the creation of scheduled downtimes:

• Name: Name of the scheduled downtime, required field.
• Group: Group the downtime will belong to. Only one group to which the user creating the scheduled downtime belongs to may be assigned, unless that user explicitly belongs to group ALL.
• Execution: It allows you to configure it to run once or periodically, either monthly (Monthly) or weekly (Weekly) or through cron. Depending on the option selected, different ways of setting time periods will be displayed; in periodic mode, you may even set an expiration date (if disabled, the scheduled downtime will not be executed after the specified date).
• Types of scheduled downtime (Type list): Disable Agents, Disable Modules, Disable only alerts o Quiet.

To save, click Add and then add, using the filter, the Agents and Modules affected by the scheduled downtime.

The Disable Agents option disables the selected agents. This selection may be filtered using Group filter to choose only those agents that belong to a specific group. If the Recursion option is also enabled:

• The agents that primarily belong to the subgroups of the selected group will be displayed.
• Agents that belong secondarily to the subgroups of the selected group will be displayed.

Scheduled downtimes with version 783 or earlier: It is important to note that if an agent is manually disabled before the task is launched, it will be re-enabled once the task is complete.

Scheduled downtimes with version 784 or later: If an agent is manually disabled before launching the scheduled downtime, that agent will remain in that state once the task is complete.

If a group is selected in Group filter and option Any is used in Available agents, all group and subgroup agents will be added regardless of the status of the Recursion option.

To save the new scheduled downtime, click Add and the added agents will be displayed in a list at the bottom of the view. Each added agent may be deleted individually.

The Disable Modules option disables the initialized and selected modules. To do this, first filter by agent groups using Group filter and then choose from the agents that belong to a single group. Depending on the agent or agents selected in Available agents, the Available modules list will display the corresponding modules. In Selection mode, the default option is to show each and every one of the modules of the selected agents (Show all modules) or, conversely, you may show only the modules in common —those with the same name— (option Show common modules).

Using option Any in Available modules with the Show all modules option will add, instead of all modules, the agents selected in silent mode (Quiet agent).

If, in addition, Recursion option is enabled:

• The agents that primarily belong to the subgroups of the selected group will be displayed.
• Agents that belong secondarily to the subgroups of the selected group will be displayed.

If a group is selected in Group filter, Recursion is activated and option Any is used in Available agents, only the modules of the agents in the group will be displayed.

To save the new scheduled downtime, click Add and then add the Agents and Modules affected by the scheduled downtime using the filter.

Option Disable only alerts only disables alerts from the selected agent modules. Care must be taken to select some of the modules (or all of them with option Any) of the selected agents before saving. Then click Add and add, using a filter, the Agents and Modules affected by the scheduled downtime.

Quiet option marks the specified modules as silent, so no alerts or events will be generated.

To save the new scheduled downtime, click Add and then add, using the filter, the Agents and Modules affected by the scheduled downtime.

Using Group filter, when you select a group, the available agents will be displayed in Available agents. From there, you may select one or more agents, and modules will be updated in Available modules. You may also select all of them using option Any. You may display the modules common to the selected agents in Show common modules or, alternatively, display all modules with Show all modules and thus make a new module selection. To finish off, click Update to update the values of the newly created scheduled downtime.

Once the modules have been added to the scheduled downtime, you may modify, delete, or add modules (which are available according to the selected filter).

When a scheduled service downtime is “active” (Running), it cannot be modified or deleted, and there is an option to stop its execution (Stop downtime).

The method for managing service downtimes is too specific, and there are often certain “cyclical” situations that must be taken into account, such as quickly and promptly deactivating all agents or scheduling a general downtime every week from a certain time to a certain time.

For this type of operation, there are ways to do it from the command line using the CLI.

To enable all agent groups:

pandora_manage /etc/pandora/pandora_server.conf --enable_group All
[INFO] Enabling all groups

To disable them:

pandora_manage /etc/pandora/pandora_server.conf --disable_group All
 
[INFO] Disabling all groups

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