[Zenoss-dev] Re: New User: 100% custom monitoring

[Eric Newton]

> I will probably end up writing the collector, as I have a lot of HTML to parse.
> Will zennos allow me to display data collected from multiple sources in one table?

Yes, zenoss will let you roll-up date from multiple sources in reports
and graphs.  You may need to write something to produce the report you need.

> For example, I would need information from the apache server-status page along with some values from our own monitoring pages, the information would need to be collected from different URLs, is it a problem?
> 
> Are there examples of HTML parsing collectors anywhere?

Well, there's the HttpMonitor zenpack. It measures the response time and
correctness of http transactions.   There's a small section on writing
your own collector in the Developers Guide.  If you have questions,
please post them here, and we'll get the answers folded back into the
Dev Guide.

> Hmmm... very interesting... 
> So, I can collect the data with zennos, but run my own external tests on it? 
> Is the logical grouping I asked about possible? Otherwise I would need to hardcode the grouping somewhere else, thus losing the big advantage of centralized monitoring/management.

You can add a logical, hierarchical grouping with Zenoss "Groups" and
"Systems".  I'm not sure that it provides the detailed dependency
information, but it's nice for rolling up event information into a
meaningful application-level summaries.

You can have custom event views if that's not fine-grained enough.  You
can customize events as they arrive.

-Eric