924265 - add an alert date field/mechanism to the "Infrastructure & Operations" product

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Administration, task)

Description

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

Greetings BMO Overlords,

We have a desire to be able to do some better alerting on our bugs in Bugzilla. At present, we have some IRC bots that are capable of checking the severity of a given component and issue an alert in a specific channel if a bug with too-high of a severity is open and has been opened for too long.

We'd like to extend this so that the bot could also alert based on a user-entered datestamp. That is, we'd enter a date somewhere in the bug metadata, and the bot would, on that date (and every day thereafter), send the same alert into the channel indicating the bug needed work. The bot code for this is fairly simple... we just need to work out how to store that datestamp in the bug.

The 2 options I can see would be a whiteboard tag ("[NagiosBotAlert 2014-01-01]") or a custom field usable by bugs within the "Infrastructure & Operations" product. I don't get the impression a flag would work, as a flag seems to expect a username in the payload, not an arbitrary value.

This would be polled daily (and most likely only with the I&O product), so it seems unlikely to cause a severe performance issue. We could probably even skip all whiteboard searching on the bugzilla side and do it all on the client, if that turns out to be useful... though that would be more data for BMO to send out on the wire since most bugs wouldn't have this set.

Do you have any preference on this?

I know there's also some stuff in the pipeline on a more well-defined relationship between Bugzilla/BMO and applications that use data from it (like a data push API instead of polling). I don't know how exactly that plays in here or what the timeline on that is, but it might be worth taking into consideration.

Comment 1

[:glob ✱]

> Do you have any preference on this?

use the existing "due date" field (cf_due_date).

it isn't currently enabled on the infra product, but it's a simple code change to enable it.
it's visible on 'developer engagement' bugs (eg. bug 904404).


the planned push mechanism is geared around subscribers being informed when a specific bug changes, rather than being informed when bugs match certain criteria, so it isn't applicable to your proposal.

Comment 2

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

I can go ahead and commit the code change needed to enable the "Due Date" field for I & O bugs if this sounds like a reasonable solution.

dkl

Comment 3

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

Are there any semantics around the due date field? For instance, does it result in bugmails going out when the date arrives, or anything like that? I'm just wondering if there would be any effect out-of-the-box other than just another field.

Apart from that, let me get some buy-in from other key folks in IT... NEEDINFO'ing them here. For my part, this seems like a reasonable solution.

Comment 4

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

(In reply to Jake Maul [:jakem] from comment #3)
> Are there any semantics around the due date field? For instance, does it
> result in bugmails going out when the date arrives, or anything like that?
> I'm just wondering if there would be any effect out-of-the-box other than
> just another field.
> 

No. It would act like any other field and notifications would go out like all other fields
when it's value is changed. Currently we have it visible for the following:

Developer Engagement
Marketing
mozilla.org
Mozilla Reps

But nothing special is happening in those products as well.

dkl

Comment 5

[Corey Shields [:cshields]]

(In reply to Jake Maul [:jakem] from comment #3)
> Apart from that, let me get some buy-in from other key folks in IT...
> NEEDINFO'ing them here. For my part, this seems like a reasonable solution.

+1 from me

Comment 6

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

No objections here. No idea how I missed this for SO long. Fail me.

Comment 7

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

Pushed to git. Should be in next weeks production update.

To ssh://[e-mail]/webtools/bmo/bugzilla.git
   b42469e..df1d177  4.2 -> 4.2

dkl