New user, looking for scripting guidance

[jaxjaggywires]

Hey all,

I am just getting into the world of cacti, and have a question that hopefully doesn't sound too stupid.

My business has multiple servers and we want to monitor various things on each one. Now, (I think) I have the whole data source->graph workflow somewhat understood, but my main question is this: How can I get non-SNMP data from a specific server on our network (let's call it prod-serv1) and graph it on our cacti server (call it cacti-serv)? For a quick example, let's say I want to track how many specific instances of httpd are running on prod-serv1, and report back to a threshold on cacti-serv to alert us if the number goes too high.

I've tried to script this out with straightforward shell scripts, but I don't see how cacti on cacti-serv accesses this data from the prod-serv1 server. Do I need to run this through an ssh command and execute a script on prod-serv1 for cacti-serv to get the data I need for the threshold, or is there some other method I'm just not seeing? All the tutorials I've seen seem to show how to setup scripts that seem to run on the localhost to retrieve data and I just need some guidance on how to retrieve data on a separate server.

Thanks a lot for any help!

[TheWitness]

It's completely your choice, if you have keys stored somewhere, you could ssh into the node, or you could use some tool to forward the data to a table in Cacti, and then use something like the script server to pull data from the table instead of always having to ssh into the node (which limits scalability). Using the script server and the database table approach, you can monitor thousands of devices in just seconds.