Document relationships between Statistics, DBStats, Snapshots and Reports.

[m4z <[email protected]…>]

It is unclear to me from the docs

1. which of the above are the same by a different name,
2. which are deprecated or out of date,
3. which are still in development or are supposed to be used,
4. what the future plans for each are,
5. what replaces what and
6. what exactly the feature differences are.

I fill in the details and what I've already learned later.

[m4z <…>]

This is basically all useful user information I could find to help answer the above points. Please correct me where I'm wrong. Sorry for the mess.

What I have learned so far (in no particular order):

7. "reports" and "statistics" often means the same thing, the statistics plugins implement (parts of the) reporting functionality. (Can this be unified to avoid confusion?)
8. reports (of any kind, see below) must work for "bcfg2-admin pull" to work (see also #912)
9. "static reports" uses Statistics.py
10. with static reports, you have to manually run an import script (from cron, for example): lib/Server/Reports/importscript.py
11. with static reports, you create your reports with bcfg2-build-reports, which first tries to ping all of your machines (which is NOT documented in the manpage) unless you give it -N (which is now documented in the manpage (r6090)); part of this is already reported as #930.
12. for static reports, you have to create a config file first, but I could not find documentation on how to do that (or is that the second file from #953?)
13. "dynamic reports" can be used with either Statistics.py or DBStats.py
14. the docs on "dynamic reports" document dynamic reports with DBStats.py
15. the former documentation is somewhat dated and "dynamic (web) reports" describes a simpler way to use dynamic reports with DBStats.py, this should be used instead of the former
16. with dynamic reports, you create your reports with bcfg2-reports (which has NO manpage)
17. all three documents on static, dynamic and dynamic web reports are incomplete. for dynamic web reports, i will file another ticket once i get it to work reproduceably.
18. Snapshots was designed to replace(?) dynamic reports, but hasn't gotten much attention lately, so it is still suggested to use "dynamic (web) reports"(?)

[solj]

We are deprecating everything except DBStats in order to avoid confusion such as this. Please reopen this ticket if you still have questions once 1.3 is out.