[collectd] Group hosts logically

[Christian Dervaric]

Hi,

I am already using collectd and really like it. But I have a small issue.

I am running several servers on amazon combined with auto scaling etc so 
the instances partly have very short live times. These servers can be 
grouped logically e.g. by environment (staging, production) or by type 
(tomcat, apache, postgresql) etc.

I already have a self-created graphical interface to combine/aggregate 
different rrds according to hostnames into graphs. What I would like to 
be able is to group these rrds after the logical groups. The most simple 
idea I could come up would be to have the hostname containing the 
information so I can use regular expression in the view to group the 
rrds after this.

Example:
live-tomcat-domU-12-39-...
live-tomcat-domU-43-24-...
staging-tomcat-domU-98-39-...

This way I could group in the view e.g. after:
live-tomcat*
*tomcat*
staging*

But I guess this is not possible? Or can I just set anything as hostname 
in the collectd.conf? From the documentation it reads like this has to 
match the originial hostname of the machine?

Though having something like tags would be even nicer.

I cannot really do some lookup what kind of machine it is later on in 
the view, as the machines might already be down again.

Have you any recommendations or ideas? Did you do something similar and 
if yes how did you solve this problem? I would be very grateful for any 
help. :)

Regards,
Christian