[Xymon] Process change

[Jeremy Laidman]

Can you elaborate on "found a way"?  I'm guessing you sent a status message
with testname="mytest" color="client" like so:

$XYMON $XYMSRV "status hostname.example.com.mytest client $CLIENTDATA"

This is a special case to support backwards compatibility.  It's probably
better to use a client message like:

$XYMON $XYMSRV "client/mytest hostname.example.com.$OSTYPE $CLIENTDATA"

(In both cases, $CLIENTDATA might need to start with a newline.)

That's all beside the point.  They should both work for you.  But what you
end up with is simply an extra section in the clientdata, and that's all.

What normally happens from here, for things like cpu, disk, memory and so
on, is that the xymond_client process parses the client data, works out the
status for each (typically against configurations in analysis.cfg) and then
creating whatever graphs and status messages are relevant.  The important
thing to note here is that xymond_client has special code to handle each
and every case; if you want extra client data to be handled, you have to do
it yourself, using a server-side script.  None of the code in xymond_client
is generic enough to deal with new client data it hasn't been programmed
for.

Let's say you want to write your own code to parse the client data and
create your own status messages.  You have a couple of options to do this.
Firstly, you could create a script that uses "xymon clientlog" such as:

$XYMON $XYMSRV "clientlog hostname.example.com section=mytest"

Try this out using "cpu" and "df" and "free" instead of mytest, to get a
feel for it.  You should be able to extract your "[mytest]" section in this
way.

Then, all you need to do is parse the output, and generate your own status
(and optionally, data) messages.  You'd run your script every 5 minutes
from tasks.cfg or cron.  There will almost certainly be a delay between
when the client data message arrives and when your script runs, leading to
delays in alerting of up to 5 minutes.

The second way to do this is to create your own xymond_client module
equivalent, attached to a new instance of xymon_channel.  This method
allows you to parse the client data message as soon as it arrives, and act
accordingly (presumably creating your own data/status messages).  When
running xymond_client, you can specify a filter so that you only get the
matching messages.  For example, in tasks.cfg you might have:

[mytest]
  ENVFILE /bla/bla/xymonserver.cfg
  NEEDS xymond
  CMD xymond_channel --channel=client --logfile=$XYMONSERVERLOGS/mytest.log
name_of_your_script_here

Your script will get the whole client data message as soon as it arrives,
on standard input.  It's up to your script to parse this any way you need,
such as matching hostnames and/or OS types, extracting the [section] you're
interested in, separating each message from the next, and making
status/data messages according to your needs.  Each message starts with
"@@client#..." and ends with "@@".

Something to try (running as the xymon user):

xymond_channel --channel=client sed -n '/^\[cpu\]/,/^\[/p'

This displays only the lines between [df] and the next line that starts
with "[".

Writing your own xymond_channel module is not a trivial task.  I would only
entertain this strategy if you needed a fast response time.

Cheers
Jeremy


On 7 August 2015 at 00:26, David Welker <dewelker at gmail.com> wrote:

> Okay, in answer to my own question, I finally found, or so I thought, a
> way to add my client data to the Xymon clientdata, but how do I get it to
> show up under a specific section?  If I provide a TESTNAME, it ends up
> under a different collector id - [collector id: mytest].  If I make
> TESTNAME blank, it doesn't show up at all!
>
> Thanks,
> ​
> David
>
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