[collectd] Shouldnt collectd also provide an interface to the data?

[Florian Forster]

Hi Yann,

On Fri, Sep 04, 2009 at 04:40:56PM +0200, Yann wrote:
> So, here comes my christmas wish for collectd.. Could collectd 5
> provide a read interface to the data, an API that my frontend GUI
> could use to gather the data and display it nicely? With the data that
> gets taken out of csv or SQL if that' were I write to.. That would
> make it a lot easier to graph the data on a different server than the
> one doing collectd.

so far collectd is basically pipelined. The data enters the daemon on
one side, for example by being read from somewhere or received via the
network, and leaves one the other side (possibly multiple times). There
is next to no “history” recorded within the daemon.

Reading the RRD files back and providing an interface to that data is
well beyond the scope of collectd I'm afraid.

However, it currently looks a bit like RRDCacheD might step up to fill
this gap. With proper support in the library (and possibly command line
tools as well) accessing the data might become as simple as:

  handle = rrdc_connect (server_address);
  data   = rrds_fetch (handle, args);

In general I think collectd is not the right place for this kind of
stuff. But having some sort of general export mechanism in place and do
the graphing somewhere else is definitely a great idea.

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