NAME
App::Standby - Managing on-call rotation and notification queues
DESCRIPTION
This distribution provides a small Plack webapp which helps with managing on-call rotations and notification queues. It allows you to manage several different queues from on place. It is easily extendible by plugins which can talk to virtually API endpoint to update a queue or a contact.
Most organizations have at least one big monitoring system (like Nagios or Zabbix) and at least one external service level monitoring and other means of notification, If you don't want to pass around a shared on-call mobile you have to remember to update all those services when the one on duty changes. This app will help you with that.
It allows you to manage several groups with their own queues and update each groups external services with just one click.
METHODS
get_groups
Returns a list of all groups.
NAME
App::Standby - Managing on-call rotation and notification queues
SETUP
This app can be run as CGI or from within an PSGI runtime like Starman.
It needs not runtime configuration unless you want to change the path to the SQLite database file.
You need to bootstrap the app by creating the first group like this:
standby-mgm.pl bootstrap -nRoadies -kbaseThis will create the group named "Roadies" with the key "base". The key is a simple shared key necessary to change any value for this group in the webinterface. This is the most basic form of authorization, but has proven sufficient so far. Patches for more extensive forms of authentication are welcome.
WARNING: Make sure the database file is owned by the user service the webinterface and also accessible by the user execution your cronjobs, e.g. www-data.
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/lib/standby-mgm/CONFIGURATION
This section provides an example of a complete configuration using dummy values for names, phone numbers, URLs and the like.
SERVICES
In order for this app to do anything there must be two things in the database: users and services. This section will show you how to create the later.
First select services and open up the new service dialog. Enter a short name for this service. Remember it must be all lowercase alphanumerics since it's going to be used as a prefix for the configuration values later. The description can be anything. Select the appropriate class and enter the group password you've dedfined when bootstrapping the service.
Choose class HTTP for a simple endpoint which just gets the whole ordered user list as a JSON string. Chosse MS for a Monitoring::Spooler endpoint and Pingdom if you have an Pingdom account.
Add as many services as necessary.
Next select config from the menu and add new config items. For each service at least one. The HTTP service need an endpoint, so if the HTTP service was called simple then the config item for the endpoint must be called simple_endpoint and contain something like http://simple.domain/api/.
For any pingdom service there must be at least four config items. The necessary items are apikey, username, password and contact_id. The last one may be given multiple times to update multiple Pingdom contacts in one account. If your service is called pingdom the keys would be called pingdom_apikey, pingdom_username, pingdom_password and pingdom_contact_id.
The MS service class needs an endpoint and a group id (name_group_id) which is used to update the appropriate group in the MS DB. If you call your MS service "ms" then the necessary keys would be called "ms_endpoint" with a value of e.g. "http://localhost/ms/?rm=update_queue" and "ms_group_id" with a value of e.g. "1".
Have a look at the CPAN distribution Monitoring::Spooler for more documentation on MS.
CONTACTS
To be able to notify someone you must add some contacts. Since the whole point of this app is to help with managing changing on call rotations you should create more than one contact.
Create at least two contacts. The name may be anything but you should know who it is refering to. The cellphone number should be in normalized international format (+<countryprefix><areaprefix> <extension>). Again, enter the group key to authenticate yourself.
After creation contacts are disabled and won't participate in any rotation, so be sure to enable some users (usually all).
Some services may need additional configuration per users, so you can store additional config under each user.
Now you need to change the notification order at least once to make sure all remote services are updated. This happens only when the order is changed.
PLUGINS
Have a look at the examples directory for some example plugins.
DEBUGGING
If anything goes wrong have a look at the logfile. Depending on your configuration its either at /var/log/standby-mgm.log or /tmp/standby-mgm.log.
AUTHOR
Dominik Schulz <dominik.schulz@gauner.org>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 2012 by Dominik Schulz.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.