Feature request: ping after LED change or sort by LED

[The_Penguin]

We have an office full of laptops and some staff come and go during the day.

I normally sort my host list by ping reply and manage systems that are online.

I know that BatchPatch stops pinging after a while, which is a good thing, but sometimes what happens is a laptop will go offline, the LED will turn red, but the ping reply is still at 0ms.

I’ll try to do something to that computer, and get various errors, not realizing they’re gone.

What I’d like, is either a ping-after-led change, or some other way to sort by online status, like sort on the LED column.

Thanks

[doug]

I have a few notes…

1. There is a setting under ‘Tools > Settings > Grid preferences > Automatically stop pinging when host comes online after having been offline’ This is enabled by default, but it can be disabled. If this setting is disabled, BP will never stop pinging a host (unless the host is unavailable, in which case you will see in orange, italic text ‘Ping Failed: Could not find host.’ This generally will only appear if the host actually does not exist, as compared to a host that exists but is taken off the network, which will usually produce a timeout instead of a failure. In your case you might want to simply disable this setting so that your individual row pings never stop and are therefore always accurate.

2. If pinging is active, then the ping reply column value will be in regular, black text. If pinging is no longer active for a given row/host, the ping reply column value will be in gray italic text. Knowing this should help eliminate any confusion as to whether the value might be stale. If it’s gray italic, it’s not running, and so it might not be accurate anymore.

3. The LEDs are affected in two independent ways. If you click on the LED column header image, then a single thread is launched that goes down the list of hosts one by one to check each host’s status. The LED images for each row are then colored according to the results of that thread’s pings. This thread will loop over every host in the grid, indefinitely, until you stop it by clicking again on the LED column header image. Separately from this thread, the LEDs can also be modified by each individual row’s ping thread. So if you select one, some, or all rows, and then you select ‘Actions > Ping > Start pinging’ each row will launch its own individual ping thread, which will change the color of only that row’s LED, depending on the result of the pings.

All that said, I think you are seeing the ping reply column be inconsistent with the LED image because you are using both the LED ping thread as well as each individual row’s ping thread. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but you just have to be aware that if the individual row stops pinging because the machine went offline and then came back online (and you had your settings set to stop pinging when this occurs, as noted at the top of this posting), it’s still possible that at a later time the machine can be taken offline and the LED will turn red if the LED ping thread is running, even though the individual row’s ping thread stopped long ago.

So, if you are using the LED ping thread, and the LED for a row is red, then you can know that the machine is offline, regardless of what the ping reply column says. Alternatively, if you simply pay attention to the color and type of text in the ping reply column, that also tells you if the pinger is actively executing or not (black regular text is running, gray italic text is stopped).

I hope this helps.

[The_Penguin]

Thanks for the very comprehensive reply!

1- yes, probably the best option is to just disable that setting.

2- Hmm didn’t know that, never noticed a color change on a ping response, that’ll help.

3- yes, paying attention. if I could do that consistently… 🙂 Aside from not noticing, depending

on what info I’m interested in at the time, the LED column may be scrolled off the screen.

Again thanks, great answers.

[Author]

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