Automatic tree grouping

[chercen]

Hello,

It has just come to my mind something that could be useful for users who have large numbers of (disorganized) devices and do not want to organize the in the tree view since it requires a lot of time and is quite static (I have spend a looot of time arranging mine ....


It would be handy if one could assign each device a set of "Properties". That is, when adding a new device you would be asked to set a value to this properties, for example:

- State: Florida
- City: Miami
- Kind of device: Switch
- Company: Nokia
- Business Unit: Mobile
- Department: Support
- ...

or you could leave them blank, and cacti would assign that device the default value. You could add new "Properties" anytime, and new "Property" would get the default value until you changed it.

This way, it could be possible to arrange a tree view automatically: you could configure different views: by state, by city, by state and city and so on.
Each time you chose one view, the tree automatically would rearrange itself so that it would show a new view. For example, if you chose "View by State and then by city", the tree view would look like:

Washington
|--- WashingtonDC
| |---- Device A
| |---- Device B
|--- OtherCity
| |---- Device C
| |---- Device D
|
Florida
|--- Miami
| |---- Device E
| |---- Device F
|--- OtherCity2
|---- Device G
|---- Device H

If you chose "View by City and then by department" the new tree would be:

Washington
|--- Sales
| |---- Device A
| |---- Device B
|--- Human Resources
| |---- Device C
| |---- Device D
Miami
|--- Sales
| |---- Device E
| |---- Device F
|--- Marketing
|---- Device G
|---- Device H

Cacti would be able to do this just because each device belongs to a city, to a department, to a state....

I do not know it this is difficult to do (maybe just some more -customizable- fields like the "Community" one, and a few changes to tree view)....... Just an idea that might be interesting or help think about new ideas

Regards,

Cesar

[Fred]

While not exactly what you proposed, I'd also like to see some automatically generated graph trees.

When I add a new host, I generally create a device from a template, then add that host to a particular leaf of a tree (Say, "Servers->Domain Controllers"). Then I go to a different tree and add the graphs by type ("Servers->Disk Usage", "Servers->Memory Usage", etc). It's a time consuming process, and I think it could be easily implemented with two automatic trees.

1) Host Templates:
This would automatically categorize my "Domain Controllers" together (provided I'd taken care to make good host templates), each with their own subheading.
2) Graph Templates:
This would automatically put all my CPU usage graphs together on a tree.

These two automatic trees would save a bunch of time when adding a new device to cacti. (and I remember when I had to add each graph individually when there were no trees, so don't think that I don't appreciate how far cacti's come!)

In pipe dream world, it would be nice if there were some sort of a "Smart Tree", where I could assign criteria to branches of the tree and have them be auto-generated. ("Devices in 192.168.0.0/16", "Graphs where the last result was NaN", "Devices where description is like '%core%")

I dream... Perhaps I've been using iTunes too much.

[carlilek]

And while we're doing graphing pipe dreams, I'd like to be able to select a few graphs (from separate trees!) and view them all on one page. Perhaps there's a way to do this now. What I'm looking to do is compare the graphs from particular port(s) on router(s) with particular port(s) on switch(es), possibly even down to the ports on the individual machines (assuming I can get that working). That way, it's easy to associate particular spikes at odd times with particular machines and WAN interfaces. Could even throw CPU spikes in there as well...