New Reporting System

Now available in Bcfg2 0.8.2

Installation

Installation Guide

Summary and Features

The new reporting system was implemented to address a number of deficiencies in the previous system. By storing statistics data in a relational database, we are now able to view and analyze more information about the state of the configuration, including information about previous configuration. Specific features in the new system include:

• The ability to look at past statistics information.

• More recent data concerning hosts. The import script may be run quite often, updating the database that contains all statistics information. In the future we anticipate development of a database based statistics module for the server that will allow statistics updates to happen immediately as configuration changes happen.

• Additional information display in reports. Primarily, reasons for configuration item verification failure are now accessible. This additional data is provided only by the most recent client.

• Instead of static pages, pages are generated on the fly, allowing users to drill down to find out about a specific host, rather than have one huge page with too much information.

Planned improvements include

- Accounts, customized displays for each admin. And privacy of config data.

- Config browsing capabilities; to look at your config in an interesting way. Fixing all the known bugs from below.

Unfortunately with all the improvements, there are a few less exciting elements about the new reporting system. The new reporting system moves away from static pages and towards a real web application, which causes mainly problems with dependancies and makes installation and more difficult. This should become less of a problem over time as Django is packaged and we develop a better installation process for a web app. This should become clear when reading the Installation section that follows.

Usage

You can use these new reports in tandem with the old system. Currently the new reporting system simply periodically runs an importer script via cron. This imports the XML statistics and clients files to the relational database, building historical information. In the future, a new statistics module in the server will allow direct writing to the database whenever a configuration interaction occurs, which will make the reports always up to date.

Known Bugs and Limitations

Currently this code is being released for early adopters and not necessarily expected to be used in production. It provides great additional functionality, but is difficult to configure and there are expected database schema changes in the next version. Such changes will require the loss of any historical statistics info that is collected in the interim.

- Doesn't allow you to view limited groups of hosts (filtering)

- Pingability (Up/Down) of hosts doesn't work in a reasonable way; verify manually

- Sorting is broken

Screenshots