Use timestamp files for tracking state or progress
Sometimes you need a simple way for processes to hand off simple information or flags between cooperating processes
- Is daily system housekeeping running, or complete?
- Monitoring tools can look for timestamp flag files and alert if something failed, or has taken too long
- Is a process or task allowed to run? Or has someone or something
set a flag to indicate that it should not be run?
- We use a timestamp file to say whether or not puppet is allowed to run
- We use timestamp files to indicate that database replication should be stopped (during maintenance), and implement a simple "lockout/tagout" system so that multiple people can turn off replication, and it won't be turned back on until the last person agrees.
- Has a periodic task completed correctly recently?
- A cron job can update a timestamp file when it completes, a monitoring system can alert if the task hasn't completed successfully within a reaonable time period. e.g. Some number of failures are acceptable, but consistent failures are not.
The timestamp command manipulates files in known directories in /tmp. There are option flags to create, query, and remove timestamp files. Thus providing a very simple, primitive way of communicating via flag files, in a standardized fashion.
Dead simple, but we think it's handy.
It would be nice to be able to compare to the time a timestamp was set, using the timestamp command itself. Currently, we use things like the check_file_age monitoring plugin.