Adding additional poller jobs?

[Howie]

Is it possible to add new items to poller_items so that the Cacti poller will collect additional SNMP data for me?

In both uptime and weathermap, it'd probably be better if I let (for example) Spine do the data collection instead of me trying to duplicate writing something that efficiently collects SNMP data.

[gandalf]

Not yet. Were do you suppose that this data should be stored, then? In an rrd file? You will need the whole "environment", then, not only the poller_item
R.

[Howie]

Not yet. Were do you suppose that this data should be stored, then? In an rrd file? You will need the whole "environment", then, not only the poller_item
R.

That's what I thought. I've never really looked too closely at the data flow in the poller. It could just collect in in a poller_output hook and then let it be dropped on the floor, I suppose?

I was writing something to use Cacti SNMP functions to collect version info last week, and it got me wondering if I could make use of the already-existing and already-optimised poller to fetch other data (like uptime, or other SNMP things that plugins might use but not be graphed by Cacti). The other use-case was for script-queries where SNMP data is parsed and processed to make data for Cacti - like VPN stats or BGP stats on some Cisco devices. If the poller collected the values, it would probably be more efficient than the naive script duplicating effort.

[gandalf]

For sure you may use the poller to fetch data. But you still have to deal "with the rest" to make it at least NOP (no operation). I honestly do not know whether this is possible at all. But it may be worth the investigation.
Plugin DSSTATS makes use of poller_output data so this may serve as an example how to fetch data from there to use it in any plugin. But I fear that this way of "design" can't be stressed very far. So perhaps we need a "real design" to add this capability to cacti through a set of function calls (well, Tony doesn't like api_<functions> so I won't mention them here ).
R.