On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 01:40:54PM +0100, Jones, Jason (Altrincham) wrote:
I asked this question before but got a mixed response. If I wanted to add an additional test to the client data received by hobbit from a client machine with the intention of writing a server side module to produce a status message (the way the core hobbit tests do) how would I go about sending the data from the client to the server?
I have looked at the man pages for bb and I think it's the data "stream" i.e:
$BBHOME/bin/bb <Server IP> "data foo,bar,com.test\n This is a test"
But after running this nothing appears on the server - have I misunderstood?
There are really 3 different ways you can feed information into Hobbit.
"status" message. The simplest one - the client determines everything, including the color of the status, and sends all of it to the Hobbit server. There is no server-side processing of the status, it just goes on the web display (and triggers alerts, stores graph data etc.)
"data" message. Similar to "status", but it doesn't generate a status column item on the webpage. This data is just copied to the server-side modules that are fed from the "data" channel; they can then do whatever they like with the data, including some analysis that ends up generating a "status" column. But in itself, the data you send in a "data" message does nothing on the Hobbit server. This is currently used for some of the standard data that Hobbit tracks, like "vmstat" which doesn't have a status column but which does get analysed and stored in graphs.
"client" message. A special kind of "data" message generated by the Hobbit clients. You really shouldn't generate this kind of message from a script; if you must, then I'd recommend adding it to the hobbit-client's bin/hobbitclient-OSNAME.sh script. The reason is that the server- side module handling "client" messages assumes that certain parts of the client-data is always present, so if you feed it a message with only your custom bits then things might break.
So you're on the right track, I think, with your custom "data" message. You just need to come up with a small server-side script to grab the message off the Hobbit "data" channel on the server. Try running (on the Hobbit server, logged in as the "hobbit" user)
bbcmd hobbitd_channel --channel=data catand then fire off the command on the client that sends your test-data; you should then see it dumped to the screen on your Hobbit server.
Regards, Henrik