Friday, November 23, 2007

Whardier Wants You - For Domesday Army

Programmers, Thinkers, Admins.. If you have an interest in system monitoring, statistical information gathering, writing kick booty Python and Django apps then join the lists and pop into the domesday IRC channel hosted at Freenode.

IRC Link: irc://irc.freenode.net/#domesday

I'm hoping to start discussion through the mailing list on the nature of the XML-RPC statistics daemon and how information will be stored on Django servers filesystem.

Lets get a minimal amount of information gathering done on Linux hosts and get that information pushed to an XML-RPC URL underneath the Django URL. My first guess is statistics need to be in stored in .rrd format on the filesystem for fast stream based access to what would otherwise be a ton of very redundant DB queries. It is very important that the client have an independent polling or stream processing structure allowing it to send delta commits to the Django server. Too much information is lost when event driven applications are polled instead of continuously inspected. Applications like Asterisk should require a statistics program to interpret the call detail logs or even inspect the server through the manager interface to get accurate call information and create non-interval based graphs.

Welcome, Fellow Admins

This project aims in a bit different direction than Zabbix and Nagios. I hope a good Django base interfacing to a myriad of different SQL backends and a good, well documented, XML-RPC system will enable this project to be widely used and easily administrated.

The Django admin interface is an amazingly simple approach toward administrating any sort of SQL data. I'm not much of a programmer, but I enjoy python and I like how Django thinks. Having a lot of the administration section of such an application pre-built will assist in much faster development than from scratch.

Check out the mailing list if you are new to Domesday.
And the following links to the source and project website currently hosted at http://code.google.com/.I understand many older projects have used the project name Domesday. On any distribution where "domesday" is a valid executable I will make alternatively named packages available. However since this project is django based, it is unlikely it will have an executable named "domesday".