[Xymon] Xymon 'data' directory

[cleaver at terabithia.org]

> On Wed, 2012-04-18 at 16:15 +0100, John Horne wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have Xymon 4.3.7 installed in '/home/xymon'. I notice that at the top
>> level there is a directory called 'data' (along with 'acks', 'disabled',
>> 'hist', 'histlogs' etc).
>>
> Actually this is within 'data', so we have '/home/xymon/data/data',
> '/home/xymon/data/acks' etc.
>
>> Can someone tell me what the 'data' directory is used for please? It is
>> empty.
>>
> Checking a bit further it seems that this is used by xymon_channel and
> xymon_filestore.
>
> What I am trying to see is if it is possible for a client to send some
> information to the server, but have the server simply store the
> information in a file (ideally one per host per test, similar to found
> in the 'data/hist' directory). The information will be similar to a
> status, but will include items which I will have processed later on the
> server.
>
> I saw mention of 'usermsg' in the xymon(1) man page. Not sure if that
> could be used... more checking required I think.
>

This does indeed mirror the old BB way of doing things. Check out the
[storedata] stanza within tasks.cfg and enable it to start storing "data"
messages. "Data" messages don't generate a status column named after their
test, and are stored directly on the disk (if storedata is enabled). They
also aren't queryable remotely, but anything can subscribe to the "data"
channel if you want to process the "data" datastream live.

Asynchronously looping over files in the data/data/ directory and doing
something with them works too.

HTH,

-jc