Data collection plugins

[gregm]

Hi Ian, Cacti community

I haven't been active here in a while, as I've been extremely busy at a new job and working on a new project (a SCADA system that provides real-world control for water treatment systems). I've chosen rrdtool, and consequently, Cacti, for graphing and trends. (I previously used it on http://status.digitalorphans.org).

Anyways. My system uses a TCP server to connect all various processors (input, output, control, logging, etc). I was trying to think of a nice way to connect cacti to the system, and really the best way would be to open one TCP connection and get all the required values directly from the TCP server. Using scripts (which I will do for the moment), if there's 30 variables that need to be graphed, it will have to open and close 30 TCP connections every minute.

I was going to modify cmd.php and the interface scripts so I could have an additional option for my specific tcp script, and then I thought maybe it would be nicer to have a plugin architecture to be able to add inputs like that (SNMP and Scripts could be rewritten in the plugin architecture). Another one could be a database connection, or anything that collects bulk data - an XML page providing multiple values, a remote system. It would reduce the number of times connections need to be made (thus increasing speed) and eliminate the need for complicated caching scripts that fetch the data seperately.

Is this doable? Thoughts, can anyone think of other uses or reasons?