Use Cacti with devices that actively push their data?

[patcas]

Dear,
after reading this forum for many hours hoping to find an answer on my question, I can't find it.

Here's my question:
I'm hoping that I can use Cacti for logging and presenting graphs of temperatures of home sensors (home automation thermostats).
These sensors are connected to a home automation bus which in turn is connected to a TCP/IP gateway.
Every minute or so (adjustable), each sensor is "broadcasting" its measured temperature on the bus in the form of a small ASCII text **SPAM**.
When a TCP socket is opened to the TCP/IP gateway, these ASCII messages are available to any application wanting to do something with it.

As far as I have been reading about Cacti, the whole principle of Cacti is based on a central polling mechanism that gathers all data.
I was hoping that Cacti could also be used for receiving data that is actively pushed to it over e.g. an IP socket link.

Can anyone advice if this would be possible?
If not, what alternatives to Cacti might be available out there somewhere for collecting and presenting pushed data?

Thanks,
Patrick.

[Osiris]

Is the data formatted for graphite?

[patcas]

Hi,
not sure what you mean with "graphite"?

The messages are simple text based messages, formatted like this :
*A,0,x,yy; *Z,zz;
They all start with a start-of-message indicator "*" (asterisk) and end with the end-of-message indicator ";" (semicolon).

"A" means that an analog value is to follow (the "Z" message)
x = a group number (0-F)
yy = an address (00 to FF)
zz = the analog value of e.g. a temp sensor (00-FF)

I've read somewhere that it might be possible to listen for these messages, convert them into a suitable format and write them directly into the Cacti's database.
So Cacti could make graphs of this data.
Could that work ?
How should that be done ?