Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Monitoring your monitoring system

The group I’m in here at a major telecommunications provider has a nice little setup of HP’s OpenView and Remedy’s Action Request System. OpenView listens for and seeks out problems with various internal and customer-owned systems. When something serious occurs, it uses some 3rd party integration software (RemedySPI) to create a trouble ticket in Remedy. … [Read more…]

Unix command line utility program conventions

Sometimes a vendor supplies a command-line utility for performing some function that we want to use from within our scripts and programs.

There are some unwritten (at least as far as I can find) rules about how to write one of these utilities so it can be used properly.

Some vendors get this right. Others, not so much…