On 03/03/2011 21:34, Paul Gear wrote:
Hi folks,
I've been using Observium for a few weeks now and would like to start getting it work better with some of my unrecognised devices. Is there any general documentation about how to go about adding new device types? I'm not much of a PHP programmer, but i've done enough C & Java that i can usually muddle along. Which bits should i start hacking on?
Whichever bits you'd like to improve. There are things that need done just about everywhere. It's a good idea to be present in our IRC channel when doing work, so that you can communicate with other devs and users.
We've some philisophical ideas about how things should be done that might not match with what you want to do, so always best to check first :)
Also, we prefer to take patches via IRC, as svn-diffs hosted on a www somewhere.
For what it's worth the main devices i'm looking to support are Xirrus wireless arrays. I notice that Netgear switches are explicitly mentioned as not supported, but the limitation listed in the wiki (that they don't support MAC addresses in the IF-MIB) doesn't appear to be completely accurate - at least for my GS-108T at home.
You can probably ignore the things we say don't work. Those were a long time ago, and we now have better methods of detection. I should go back sort that page out.
The low end vendors do have very variable support for things :)
Some features i think would be really great (and am prepared to work on):
* Filtering on the global memory screen (health/memory/) so that we can view, e.g., just physical memory, or just virtual memory, etc. A simple drop-down at the top of the list would make sense to me.
A good idea :)
* The global storage screen (health/storage/nographs/) would make a lot more sense to me if the size of the area which was shaded was relative to the size of the storage. Making the width of the gauge grow on a logarithmic scale would make sense to me.
Well, how do you scale that so it stays relevant? In 5 years time we'll all have disks 10 times the size, etc, etc.
And some questions and related suggestions:
* When we ignore a port, does that prevent graphing and data collection on it, or just notification? I have a lot of edge switches for which i have no use of port up/down notifications, but if it is up, i would like to collect the interface stats. Perhaps the "ignore" tickbox needs to be split into "collect" and "notify"?
Ignore still collects, but alarms and the like should ignore the device. Disabled disables polling.
* Why do HP switches show VLANs as ports, but then never provide any interface statistics for them?
Because like most vendors, HP can't implement SNMP for shit.
adam.