There are several ways in which avail reporting and handling could 
possibly be improved.  This is a tracker bug for all of it.  
Below is an etherpad clipping for various thoughts and ideas.

======================================================================


Fixing Availability

Availability is the RHQ way of reporting whether a resource is up, down or in an unknown state.  It is a critical  component in monitoring and alerting.

Unfortunately, RHQ today has serious issues with availability handling:

    * Very slow reporting of availability changes.  

    * availability reports are not sent frequently from the agent

    * 5 or more minutes can pass before avail is actually updated

    * Very disconcerting in the UI when we report a status the user knows is incorrect.

    * Perhaps unusable for SLA outages.

    * Resource cycling can actually be missed.

    * Availability reports are waiting behind other long duration transfers

    * We alert only on availability change, not availability duration.

    * Only offer avail conditions "goes up: and "goes down", not "is up" and and "is down"

    * No applicable dampening, which confuses, and then dismays, users

    * No notion of "admin down"

    * Poor handling when the RHQ Agent goes down, even gracefully.

    * Slow recognition

    * Avail set to down for all monitored resources on that agent.

    * This can be misleading, unknown probably makes more sense



The main blocker to doing this better is performance.  We need to be able to monitor and report availability for a large number of resources, over a large number of agents, with little delay and litte overhead.  And for alerting purposes, we need to enhance the reporting to support dampening (on avail periods).

There are a few mechanisms in play:

    * The agent must ask the resource container for its avail state.

    * the avail checking code is plugin dependent and has no guarantees on efficiency.

    * the avail check may hang for a resource that is truly down.

    * Note that we do support an asynch avail reporting mechanism, which is useful for fast avail checking if implemented by the plugin.

    * The agent must report availability to the server.

    * The server must respond to availability changes on the resources.

    * The server must perform alerting.

    * Tables/Domain classes

    * rhq_availability (resource avail history)

    * rhq_resource_avail (resource current avail)

    * AvailabilityReport (the object passed from agent to server)

    * Checking avail on all resources: Parents, children, grandchildren...


Ideas:

    * Certainly fix https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=701092

    * Different frequencies for different categories

    * More frequent for servers, less frequent avail checking for services

    * Or, even more granularity

    * No avail checking for dependent types

    * deferral to the parent's avail

    * Detach agent avail from avail reporting

    * agent ping to server to prove it's alive

    * server ping to agent before backfilling

    * Only report avail changes (means keeping/comparing against previous report agent-side)

    * Store lastUpdateTime on ResourceAvailability to be able to calculate the length a resource has been at the current avail type

    * Agent side, process avail checks top down because any parent down implies all children are down. In fact, perhaps server side we assume that we won't get down avail below a down parent, and we handle (backfill) the children server-side.

    * make all avail checking async on the agent. meaning, the pc maintains the last known avail and checks agains that (is that possible, efficient, do we do it already)

    * Divide up server side work among HA servers, each handling its connected agents (in memory timers)

    * probability-based approaches?

    * Have avail reports be sent out-of band or as 1st prio message to the server

    * Cache ResourceAvail table / last entry in Avail table

    * base avail on PID (PC could always do that for processes and only call getAvail() when pid is up)

    * doable where?

    * push avail from plugin?



Relevant Configuration Properties:

    * Availability Report Limit  (rhq.server.concurrency-limit.availability-report)

    * Number of availability reports that can be processed concurrently; if zero or less, there is no limit

    * default  25

    * Agent Max Quiet Time

    * Number of minutes agent has to provide avail report before being backfilled

    * default 15 minutes

    * availability-scan.period-secs

    * the period between availability scans on the agent

    * default 5 minutes

    * rhq.agent.plugins.availability-scan.timeout

    * default 5 seconds


Relevant Wikis

    * http://rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Design-Asynchronous+Availability+Collector

    * http://rhq-project.org/display/JOPR2/FAQ#FAQ-Myserverlogsareshowingthemessage%22Havenotheardfromagent...Willbebackfilledsincewesuspectitisdown%22.Whatdoesthatmean%3F

    * http://rhq-project.org/display/JOPR2/FAQ#FAQ-Explainhowtheagentscansforresources

    * http://rhq-project.org/display/JOPR2/FAQ#FAQ-WhenIshutdowntheagent%2CtheRHQServertakesmorethan14minutestodetecttheagentwasdown.CanIconfigureittonottakesolong%3F

    * http://rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Ideas+about+Caching#IdeasaboutCaching-Availability


Relevant BZs
(this section removed, bugs are now linked)


Questions
When do you get unknown availability?

    * When a resource is first imported before any data has been reported for the resource


TODOs

    * Decide whether communications between servers is required.

    * Allow users to denote "important" resources for small checking intervals?


Priorities
High: Agent updates to reduce CPU utilization 
Medium/High: Server side avail reporting

2k Resources + 2 AS , 1min checks => 6k availabilities per minute coming in?
    and vice-versa - 1 agent with 50 ASes