Fix #1825 : BP rules: take into account acknowledgements and downtime

[fpeyre]

Add two parameters for a BP rule deactivate by default : business_rule_ack_as_ok and business_rule_downtime_as_ok
If activate, we treat host/service acknowledged/in downtime as if they are Up/Ok for the evaluation of the bp rule

[tomasz-kuzemko]

I'm looking forward for this feature.

What about treating downtimes as OK too? As there is business_rule_downtime_as_ack, one might expect that in combination with business_rule_ack_as_ok it will also be treated as OK.

[xkilian]

@tomasz-kuzemko One might expect that in combination with business_rule_ack_as_ok it will also be treated as OK... But no, it does not work.
acknowledgements are treated as ok on services. Downtimes are not treated as acks and also are not treated as ok. As subsequent change would need to be required to do as you request. For now, the feature works as advertised and is a requirement for BP rules that provide status on groups of independant services.

[fpeyre]

I just made a quick test for treating downtime as OK too.
We can use the same idea as business_rule_ack_as_ok. I quickly added a new parameter, business_rule_downtime_as_ok and it works just the same.

For business_rule_downtime_as_ack, according to the documentation, it said
"By default, downtimes are not taken into account by business rules smart notifications processing. This variable allows to extend smart notifications to underlying hosts or services checks under downtime (they are treated as if they were acknowledged)."

As I understand, and after looking quickly at the code, this parameter is used only on the step to determine if a notification must be sent or not (and in this case, with this parameter, the host/service in downtime has the same behaviour as if it was acknowledged)
But it is not considered as acknowledged by the rest of code ( and in our case , the step when a BP rule is evaluated). We can rename business_rule_downtime_as_ack for something less ambiguous, like business_rule_smart_notification_downtime.

Anyway, this features could make the object of another pull request/issue

[geektophe]

In my opinion, there are 2 different aspects.

• The first one, which is the purpose of smart notifications, is to alter the conditions under which notifications are sent in business rules. Smart notification do not alter the way the state is calculated. This is the expected behavior.
• The PR you're proposing does alter the state processing, as the result is to ignore acknowledged problems (or problems under downtime), which may bring a biased information.

Those 2 different ways to approach business rules state and notifications processing should be clearly identified through the configuration options, and in the code.