Can Cacti display string instead of displaying numeric data

[SilentFrame]

Hi,

This is probably the most common and/or stupid question. I'm new to the cacti technology.
I intend to graph data but i also need to show string all retrieved thanks to SNMP for our custom MIBS. The strings will be the names and the versions of the software installed on the remote devices.
I read the manual, serach in the forums but found nothing if this is possible or not. I want that the strings to be seen as "output" not "input" in a snmp XML query for example.

I need your advices, suggestions.

TIA,
SilentFrame.

[TheWitness]

If the data is organizable as a Table, such as are Interface Statistics, you can write a Data Query to present.

Even if it's not, you could take a small performance penalty and write it as a Script Server Data Query in which you could then organize the data as a table and produce your output on the Graph using the special |query_XMLTagname| syntax from within the graphs themselves.

TheWitness

[gandalf]

Please visit my Tutorials. You'll find hints for displaying text strings retrieved from targets. Look out for |query_*| stuff and for XML fields with "<direction>input</direction>"
Reinhard

[SilentFrame]

Thanks for your help.

I've read the tutorials (btw, there are great) but they did not tell me if i can display strings in table-like form instead of a graph with numerical values. The values itself are strings not numerical values i need to display some numerical values but they are not right now my priority.

Regards,
Paolo.

[gandalf]

In general, this cannot be done. Cacti is an rrdtool frontend and stores (almost) all data in rrd files. These are only capable of storing numberic data, no strings.
The only excemption to this is storing "descriptiove" information, e.g. ifDescription. These strings are stored e.g. on a per interface basis in mysql tables. But they are only refreshed when re-indexing is performed (e.g. on reboot of the target host)
Reinhard