Couple of ideas for Grouping Devices and "Sticky Templa

[BrianD]

I have been contemplating a few improvements to cacti.

1) Grouping hosts/devices by assigning the device to a groups (on the device page). My thinking is that it would make some other things easier, graph trees etc could be done by using the group list rather than manually adding hosts to different "sub trees." I had actually started to implement this, I added some tables I needed and a field to graph_tree_views, but realized that my direction may not be easily possible with the current implementation of the database/tree views.
I got as far as adding the ability to add a "Dynamic Group: " to the Graph Trees, but got roadblocked getting the graph trees to actually display them. (There is a lot of SQL/php trickery happening in that area of the code!)

2) The other idea I had was for "sticky templates." The current template model is good, but it only gets used during creation of devices. My thinking is that most people have a lot of devices that are all pretty much the same, and sometimes may want to add new graphs for that entire class of device. So I was trying to think of a way to have templates that are "Sticky" to all hosts that you apply them to. This way if you add a new SNMP attribute being graphed to the template, all hosts the template applies to will start collecting and graphing the same. I thought this concept may be able to tie in with the Grouping idea as well above. This way you could assign Sticky templates to groups, and then assign devices to groups and have all associated templates apply.

3) The other idea was bulk-adding devices, which has been mentioned a couple of times. A coworker of mine figured out a nice curl trick to get this accomplished via the web with a little bit of scripting, so it's not as big an issue, but I think both the above two items might help in this area as well. The difficulty with this obviously comes with devices that may have many interfaces/attributes and you want to be more selective about what is graphed for particular hosts. For this I was thinking perhaps the Template would have some defaults such as "Graph all interfaces matching X" where X could regex compare to the interface description or device path or somesuch attribute. e.g. All Fiber GBIC interfaces on a Cat 450x but ignore the copper ports. Or all disk partitions on hosts, etc.

In any case, I wanted to send these thoughts in to see what others have to say. I really do like cacti and would like to try to help out if I can find the time.

If these ideas have been documented elsewhere, I apologize, I did look around for similar threads.

Cheers,
Brian

[TheWitness]

Brian,

We are always looking for good developers to contribute to the code base. You should send a note to raX, if you would like to contribute.

In response to your issues:

1) There have been multiple discussions, but currently not high on the list
2) It's called inheritance (sp?) and database rework is high on the list, but not listed on our current list of features to come.
3) This is definately high on our priority list, but don't know if it will me the cut for 0.8.7. We still need to have a dialog on what's next. Right now we have to get 0.8.6 out.

TheWitness