[collectd] Collectd notification handler

[Jason Stelzer]

I am trying to avoid the fork/exec overhead when large numbers of
requests come in on a fairly busy collector.

What I would like to do is simply pass along the notification to a
daemon that will decide if the problem warrants an alert or not.

I am considering following one of the notify_ plugins such as
notify_desktop/notify_email as an example and creating a
notify_network plugin that simply passes notifications along to a
different host/port that can do a little work to mitigate flap and has
rules like "greater than X for Y minutes", etc.

The documentation for notification call backs is a big TODO here
http://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Plugin_architecture but I think the
bigger question for me is how people generally go about building their
plugins for collectd. What's the right combination of autoconf,
automake and libtool? Should I just write a hacked up Makefile to
compile the plugin and then see about contributing the code?

The other alternative is the perl plugin but there don't seem to be
any examples of how to configure it to handle notifications as opposed
to reads.

-- 
J.