Vat of Knowledge

There are instances where you will want to hide a test on the Big Brother display. For instance, if you followed the article to configure memory testing and graphing, you would want to hide the “mem” column.

Linux – Disable test

The bbdef-client.sh file has settings for the default tests like: DOCPU, DOMSGS, DOPROCS, DODISK, etc. To disable any of the test performed by the client, set the appropriate one of these parameters to FALSE.

All O/S – Hide test

The network tests are hard-coded in the BBNT Windows client and cannot be disabled; however, the network tests (columns) can be hidden or not displayed on the on the Big Brother Server display (BB machine with directive BBDISPLAY) by doing the following:

Editor note: I find the above to be incorrect. The columns does not get hidden because the tests are still performed and the *.mem entries exist on the BBDISPLAY under /usr/local/bbvar/logs and /usr/local/bbvar/hist.

1. Use the nodisp directive in the bb-hosts (or bb-hosts.cfg) file and specify the network test you don’t want displayed:

xx.xx.xx.xx hostname # nodisp:cpu

The better way bb-hosts group-only

group-only lets you define specific columns to appear in the table:

group-only  column1|column2|column3|…   <H3>Whatever you’d like the group-only title to be</H3>

Only the columns listed in the directive will be displayed in the table.  There’s a special case for group-only where you want to display all columns within a group except a set of columns. To achieve this, define the entry as:

group-only  *!column1!column2!column3!…   <H3>Whatever you’d like the group-only title to be</H3>

Notice that the seperator is a ! and not the | character.

Note. If pagetype in etc/bbwarnsetup.cfg is set to GROUP, the group directives also determine which hosts are effected by the page delay after a notification is acknowledged.
In the example above, the cpu test result for the specificied hostname will not be displayed.

2. If used as below the host’s default network test results will not be displayed:

xx.xx.xx.xx hostname # nodisp

3. As for notifications, you can specify to ignore notifications for that column based on the following rules:

For pre-3.3 versions (not including 3.3): !hosts;exhosts;services;exservices;day;time;recipients So the rule to ignore notification for the cpu network test would look like this:
!*;;;cpu;*;*;

For version 3.3 and above you would use the following rule format:
!hosts;exhosts;services;exservices;colors;day;time;recipients

So the rule would change to this:
!*;;;cpu;*;*;*;

Additional Information: Here is a list of directives you can use for any host:

dns – Check for the name resolution server.
noping – Do not do the ping test for this host.
noconn – Do not do the ping test for this host and don’t generate a clear dot.
dialup – If the host is unreachable, display it with a clear button instead of a red button
nodisp – Don’t show this entry in the display page, you can also say nodisp:cpu to not display the cpu result for this entry in the bb-hosts.cfg file.

Multiple services can be specified; nodisp:cpu:disk will remove the cpu and disk results on the display for this entry.

Source: https://support.quest.com/SUPPORT/index?page=solution&id=SOL38770&pmv=true&ct=1