[collectd] munin to collectd migration: collectd-perl examples/ideas for collection.cgi

[Florian Forster]

Hi Stefan,

On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 01:46:33PM +0100, Stefan Wiederoder wrote:
> i'm thinking about a migration from munin to collectd, because munin
> has a big scalability problem.

just out of curiosity: What's causing problems?

> the biggest part is to transfer the plugins from muninexchange, so I´d
> very grateful if somebody can provide me a few examples?

Due to your mail I got curious how Munin plugins work. My quest for
understanding resulted in this small Perl script which (tries to)
translates from Munin plugins to collectd's exec-plugin (see
collectd-exec(5)). It's nothing fancy, just a quick hack / proof of
concept ;)
<http://git.verplant.org/?p=collectd.git;a=commit;h=281ecad012b4d76a04e110ab149391fdc67c7498>

To translate a plugin from Munin to collectd, you first need to find a
suitable `type' which describes your data layout. For example, interface
counters usually use `if_octets'. This `if_octets' type tells collectd:
``Expect two counter values, the first one being RX traffic, the second
  one is TX traffic. The maximum value for both is 4294967295 bytes per
  second.''
The `types' are defined in a file called `types.db' which is located in
collectd's library path, i. e. where the plugins are, too. The syntax is
similar to RRDTool's.

> IMHO everybody needs/wants/expects a complete solution for his/hers
> client/server environment, maybe we can start to "collect" ideas for a
> web interface? (perl/PHP/ruby/whatever)

I'd welcome that a lot. I've hacked together that collection.cgi because
I wanted to see some graphs too. Then I've sometimes added a little
feature here or there when I wanted it, but I really don't enjoy web
programming a lot.. Maybe it's because I have to do it at work a lot :/

My requirements are pretty low (as you can see if you look at the
collection.cgi script ;):
- Make it possible/easy to compare certain aspects of two or more
  servers. E. g.: ``Is the load balancing working as intended?''
- Don't show a gazillion graphs on one page, so it loads fast.

Regards,
-octo
-- 
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x91523C3D
http://verplant.org/
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