Re: [Devmon] Enhancement Suggestion: DATA messages

[Buchan M. <bg...@st...>]

On Saturday 13 June 2009 01:13:18 Alan Sparks wrote:
> I've posted the following enhancement suggestion to the Devmon tracker:
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&atid=816980&aid=280574
>0&group_id=160720
>
>
> Add a new "datamessage" template (optional) to test template support.
> The datamessage file would be handled identically to the "message" file
> (same template filling behavior), except instead of being sent as a
> STATUS message, it would be sent as a DATA message.
>
> This facility would be excellent for posting performance data out of
> band to the Hobbit server.  And rather than patching Hobbit to permit
> graphing of Devmon data, it would be easy to use the --extra-script
> capability of hobbit-rrd to route the data to a user-parsing script for
> RRD updates.

1)Run Xymon 4.2.3, no patching is required for the devmon collector - many 
distributions of hobbit binaries (e.g. the hobbit RPMS shipped in Mandriva 
2009.0 and earlier, or my packages for RHEL3/4/5) already have the patch 
applied.
2)The --extra-script can be used for status and data messages
3)The --extra-script functionality is very limited, and incurs performance 
impact (as additional disk io is required to write the messages to disk before 
they are passed to the script).

> It would permit sending a human-friendy STATUS message
> (the "message" template file), as well as a more machine-parsable
> version of data (the "datamessage" template file) through the DATA channel.

Note that (AFAIK) it is impossible to use the same test name for both data and 
status messages, so I don't think this is possible. At present, the devmon rrd 
data is displayed in a separate format, and it is possible to include more 
human-friendly data that does not need to be parseable.

> Hope this makes sense.  Appreciate any comments.  And thanks for listening!

I don't yet see a reason to implement this, unless you would like to collect 
data without an associated test page on Hobbit/Xymon, or if you don't want to 
see a table on a status page when you're collecting table-based RRD 
information (and this could be implemented just as a new TABLE option).

Regards,
Buchan