[collectd] Collectd as back-end collector for ozMonitor project

[Florian Forster]

Hi Khalid,

On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 08:43:13PM +0300, Khalid wrote:
> Well, I'm sending you this email asking for few things :
> 1/ Legally, could we use collectd as back-end? I think yes ... isn't it? how
> about licensing model used now and planned for the future (not clear from
> the website)

you're right, this is not explicitely stated on the start page nor the
feature page. I'll fix that.

collectd, the daemon itself, is licensed under the terms of the GNU
General Public License, version 2. Those terms are included in the
source code distribution in the file “COPYING”.

Most plugins are licensed under the same terms, but some are “GPL 2 or
later”, there's some three-clause BSD code and, starting with
version 4.9, some MIT licensed code. For more details, please see the
“License” category in our wiki [0].

I'm not sure what you mean by using collectd as a backend. As long as
you're only *using* collectd I don't see any legal issues
whatsoever [1].

Do you plan to distribute binary versions of collectd or binary plugins
to third parties, e.g. customers? In this case you're obliged to provide
collectd's source code, any modifications and the source code of your
custom plugins to that third party. For more information on the GPL and
the copyleft principle, please take a look at the GPL FAQ [2].

> 2/ First test of collectd was great by our tester. however one of the
> plugins was  not fully working .... I mean the curl plugin ... very
> important for our  solution. Is it possible to have a simple curl plugin
> downloading the page simple and provide availability and download time as
> well as failur raison?

Yes, this is a new feature in version 4.9 which is going to be released
on December 21st. The option you're looking for is
“MeasureResponseTime”. Reporting / handling failures is currently not
implemented, but could be added in form of a notification [3].

> 3/ Simple tcp connect to a defined port (1521, 3306, 25, 110, 80, 443 etc
> ...) test using any basic tcp test librairy  (echoping for example ...)?

That's not available currently. Why don't you add that to our
wishlist [4]?

> 4/ IP/SLA probes (formerly Cisco SAA) could be supported? via SNMP plugin or
> a dedicated plugin?

If the information is available via SNMP, that is probably possible.
It'd be great if you could enhance the example config in
contrib/snmp-data.conf in this respect.

If a specialized plugin is necessary, this is certainly also possible ;)

> For sure, we can help improving you excellent tool if the current
> collectd4ozMonitorr PoV (proof of value) is positive. hopefully yes
> :-)

I'm crossing my fingers ;)

Regards,
—octo

[0] <http://collectd.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:License>
[1] Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. If in doubt, ask someone competent ;)
[2] <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html>
[3] <http://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Notifications_and_thresholds>
[4] <http://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap#Wishlist_.2F_Ideas>
-- 
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x91523C3D
http://verplant.org/
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