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

[Mariusz Gronczewski]

Hi,

2009/9/4 Florian Forster <octo at verplant.org>:
> 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.

I also agree collectd is bad place for implementing any kind of
frontend it would just bloat codebase. General problem with any tool
using RRD is that its great piece of software but there aren't any
good, easy to use "graph creators". There is collection which is nice
for start, drraw, which is good but its a bit ugly and afaik dont
don't have some advanced RRDtool functions implemented and thats it.
If u want something like "get graph with stacked all loadavg's from
all servers" or "get total network bandwidth from all servers" u have
to write a script which generates it, or update graph in drraw
everytime u add/delete host.

Regards
Mariusz