[Orca-users] Pushing for a 1.0 release

[Kai Siering]

David Michaels wrote:
> I just thought of something that would be nice to see in a 1.0 release.  
> Not sure if SE can do it, but if there was a way for the orcallator.se 
> file to have a hook for calling a user-defined external script to add 
> data points, that would be fantastic.  I've been tweaking the 
> AIX'allator perl script lately to track Citrix license usage, which 
> requires some citrix command to be run and parsed.  The data gets added 
> to the rest, and Orca plots it happily.  I now need a way to track 
> ClearCase licenses on my Sun box, but I have no way (that I know of) to 
> do this with SE (need to run 'clearlicense', and parse).
> 
> Presently, I'm looking at tracking the data separately, then figuring 
> out a way to periodically merge the data with the orcallator.se data.  
> But, ... yuck.

"Yuck"? Naa, not yuck! Just pick a new name for your datafile, have
a separate process (maybe based on procallator.pl or "AIX'allator")
maintain the datafile and the data collection process and store it
in the same directory where your orcallator*-files are. Extend your
orcallator.cfg or -- preferred, IMHO -- use a new whatever.cfg with
a separate orca-process to process _this_ data and you are done.

Basically that's what I'm doing to graph http_ping repsonse times
or the data of my wheatherstation (which, see my previous post, I
still consider to be done wrongly by Orca; something that should
be really fixed for an release 1.0). Unless it's performance data,
it SHOULD NOT be put into orcallator-* -- Orca happily handles
multiple data sources even in one .cfg, so there is simply no need
to hack orcallator.se, procallator.pl et al to death with additi-
onal features ;) Only trick is to prepare the datafiles, but that's
nicely done e. g. in procallator.pl ...

Regards,
			kai
-- 
Kai 'wusel' Siering                       eMail @ home: wusel at uu.org
Traveller on the Information Highway doing full-time administration.
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