[snips-users] Re: snmp (was: hostmon-client.linux & /proc/)

[Daniel MacKay <daniel at bonmot ca>]

For me, the big benefit of a perl-based hostmon is the ease with 
which I can toss together a new monitor.

My boss calls and says, "Can you tell me the average number of 
outstanding issues during the day?"  and by the time he's done giving 
me a long-winded explanation about why he wants that, I can have a 
graph up on that machine's snips monitoring screen, and in 24 hours 
he has a pretty graph of how many outstanding transactions, and if he 
wants, the business manager can get paged when the number of issues 
goes above some threshold.

I'm a star.

Now, yes, I know that I could make an addition to the MIBs on the 
SNIPS host machine and agent machine, make the addition to the the 
SNMP agent, add the line to snmp-conf -- but it's much easier to 
write eight lines of Perl in my local hostmon file and add one line 
to hostmon-config and its call to hostmon-osclient.

This brings me to a small feature request.  As you can see, I very 
often make additions to the hostmon agent.  I could patch those into 
hostmon-osclient, or I could patch them into the hostmon-client.myOS 
- but those get upgraded during an upgrade.  So I put them into a 
file called hostmon.locals, and add another require to 
hostmon-osclient.

If many people do this, maybe we could make it part of the 
distribution.  Presumably it would mean:
 - looking for the file in question,
 - sucking up the functions in it,
 - adding an array found in the required file, to the list of functions
   to be called.

In a perfect world it would recompile that file on every iteration so 
I didn't have to take hostmon-osclient down to make additions.

-dan
--
Daniel MacKay
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, +1 902.499.0488