Greetings,

I have been setting up Observium for a client for the last few months and I have been loving it. Amazingly flexible and reliable. I am quite pleased. I am running 22.8.12241, Subscription.

I know that Observium does not support SNMP Traps and understand why. So, I have set up syslog on the services to push events and they are caught by Observium. This works fine. I have now also created syslog alerts and this works fine too.

My issue is the delay from when the syslog comes to the server, and the alert goes out. I found this old mailing list entry:

https://lists.observium.org/hyperkitty/list/observium@lists.observium.org/message/R6ATSJHAWTKZQFZWWAPGLA4625455L7L/

Adam’s reply was: “We have to wait for a cron job to be run to send the alerts, because we can't do it in the syslog processing script. Iirc you can cron alerter.php to do it more frequently!”

This is an acceptable solution to me, but I have a couple question:

Is there risk with how often this is run? If I cron’ed this for every minute, is there a risk of some sort of collision with the 5 minute poller?

Is it possible, as a feature request, to call alerter.php -h from syslog.php when an entry comes in?

While I think Observium is an excellent piece of software, I wish it had just a little more ability to handle real-time alerts coming in. There are many situations that occur where an outage or event could be substantially shorter than the poller interval (like, a short UPS power loss), and I would like to have a little better quasi-real time alerting of these events.

Thanks for you consideration.