Data Queries <-> Data Templates

[jvanhambelgium]

Hi,

After spending some time on 0.8 I'm starting to get stuff working.
My biggest confuse is the difference between Data Queries & Data Templates ;
Could someone correct/add sometime to this please, is it correct to assume ;

- Data templates is a template for 1 item (like 1 SNMP OID, like % CPU) that you later can use as template for multiple hosts ?

- Data queries seems (looking into the XML file) a bunch of items (like dozens of SNMP OID's) that are queried together, thus making a 'package" to efficiently extract a given set of info from a device ?
If I want to monitor specific equipment I could write a XML with 10 or 20 SNMP OID's that will be grouped/polled together ? Is it something like this ?
I've seen also that you can glue a bunch of graph-templates to the multiple queries from the data-query..

- You don't need to use Data Queries ; a combination of Polling host and data/host/graph templates will also do the trick ?



Thanks & regards,
Jan

[raX]

Actually you are almost completely accurate in your descriptions of data templates and data queries.

A data template is really a 'Data Source Template', it is nothing more than that. Like you said, it is good for templating one thing like CPU load on a Cisco 2900 or disk space on my UCD-SNMP server.

Data queries serve a different purpose however. While data templates are concerned with how data is stored, data queries just handle the "querying of data" from a host to potentially graph. This querying can be done through either SNMP (SNMP Query) or a script (Script Query).

So I guess the answer to your last question: do you need to use data queries? No, but data queries serve a different purpose from data/graph/host templates. You could not duplicate the functionaliy of a data query through the use of data/graph/host templates alone.

I hope this answers your questions. Documentation is coming

-Ian