[hobbit] How does linecount work?

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 03:41:17PM -0500, Hubbard, Greg L wrote:
> 
> I am playing with the nifty new 4.2 features, and was trying to get the
> "linecount" function to work.  I *thought* I could maybe use this to
> track the number of entries in a file, and perhaps graph over time, but
> I am starting to suspect that Henrik meant linecount for something else.

No, the general idea was that linecount was a way of doing
    grep blabla myfile | wc -l
and get this into a graph.

> I see where you configure client-local.cfg with:
> 
> 	linecount:<filename>
> 	<handle>:<regex>
> 
> This should alert the Hobbit agent to start grepping <filename> for
> <regex> and somehow bind the count to <handle>?

Yes. What it ends up doing is putting a section into the client message.
In my test configuration I have this in the client-local.cfg file

   linecount:/var/log/messages
   kbd atkbd.c
   timechg system.time.change

(you can use space to delimit the <handle> from the <regex>, or colon)
which gives me this in the client data:

   [linecount:/var/log/messages]
   kbd: 0
   timechg: 16

> Then what?  Do you configure something in hobbit-clients.cfg to match
> this?

No, it should actually happen by itself. It generates an RRD file for
each of the linecount "<handle>" values. So in my example, I'll get
these two RRD files:
   lines.,var,log,messages#kbd.rrd
and
   lines.,var,log,messages#timechg.rrd

and if you have the 4.2 default settings for TEST2RRD and GRAPHS, then
this should result in a graph of the linecounts on your "trends" page
for the host.


Regards,
Henrik