<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Bcfg2 Static Reporting System — Bcfg2 1.3.0 documentation</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../_static/default.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../_static/pygments.css" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript">
var DOCUMENTATION_OPTIONS = {
URL_ROOT: '../',
VERSION: '1.3.0',
COLLAPSE_INDEX: false,
FILE_SUFFIX: '.html',
HAS_SOURCE: true
};
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../_static/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../_static/underscore.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../_static/doctools.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../_static/sidebar.js"></script>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="../_static/favicon.ico"/>
<link rel="top" title="Bcfg2 1.3.0 documentation" href="../index.html" />
<link rel="up" title="The Bcfg2 Reporting System" href="index.html" />
<link rel="next" title="Bcfg2 Web Reporting System" href="dynamic.html" />
<link rel="prev" title="The Bcfg2 Reporting System" href="index.html" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../_static/bcfg2.css" type=""/>
</head>
<body>
<div style="text-align: left; padding: 10px 10px 15px 15px">
<a href="../index.html"><img src="../_static/bcfg2_logo.png" border="0" alt="sampledoc"/></a>
</div>
<div class="related">
<h3>Navigation</h3>
<ul>
<li class="right" style="margin-right: 10px">
<a href="../genindex.html" title="General Index"
accesskey="I">index</a></li>
<li class="right" >
<a href="../py-modindex.html" title="Python Module Index"
>modules</a> |</li>
<li class="right" >
<a href="dynamic.html" title="Bcfg2 Web Reporting System"
accesskey="N">next</a> |</li>
<li class="right" >
<a href="index.html" title="The Bcfg2 Reporting System"
accesskey="P">previous</a> |</li>
<li><a href="../index.html">home</a> | </li>
<!--<li><a href="../search.html">search</a> | </li>-->
<li><a href="../help/index.html">help</a> | </li>
<li><a href="../contents.html">documentation </a> »</li>
<li><a href="../contents.html" >Bcfg2 documentation 1.3.0</a> »</li>
<li><a href="index.html" accesskey="U">The Bcfg2 Reporting System</a> »</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="document">
<div class="documentwrapper">
<div class="bodywrapper">
<div class="body">
<div class="section" id="bcfg2-static-reporting-system">
<span id="reports-static"></span><h1>Bcfg2 Static Reporting System<a class="headerlink" href="#bcfg2-static-reporting-system" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>The Bcfg2 reporting system collects and displays information about the
operation of the Bcfg2 client, and the configuration states of target
machines.</p>
<div class="section" id="goals">
<h2>Goals<a class="headerlink" href="#goals" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>The reporting system provides an interface to administrators describing
a few important tasks</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>Client configuration state, particularly aspects that do not match the configuration specification.
Information about bad and extra configuration elements is included.</li>
<li>Client execution results (a list of configuration elements that were modified)</li>
<li>Client execution performance data (including operation retry counts, and timings for several critical execution regions)</li>
</ul>
<p>This data can be used to understand the current configuration state
of the entire network, the operations performed by the client, how the
configuration changes propagate, and any reconfiguration operations that
have failed.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="retention-model">
<h2>Retention Model<a class="headerlink" href="#retention-model" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>The current reporting system stores statistics in an XML data store, by
default to <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre"><repo>/etc/statistics.xml</span></tt>. It retains either one or two
statistic sets per host. If the client has a clean configuration state,
the most recent (clean) record is retained. If the client has a dirty
configuration state, two records are retained. One record is the last
clean record. The other record is the most recent record collected,
detailing the incorrect state.</p>
<p>This retention model, while non-optimal, does manage to persistently
record most of the data that users would like.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="setup">
<h2>Setup<a class="headerlink" href="#setup" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>In order to configure your Bcfg2 server for receiving reports, you
will need to list the Statistics plugin in the plugins line of your
<tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">bcfg2.conf</span></tt>. You will also need a [statistics] section
in your <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">bcfg2.conf</span></tt>. You can find out more about what goes there in the
<tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">bcfg2.conf</span></tt> manpage.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="output">
<h2>Output<a class="headerlink" href="#output" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Several output reports can be generated from the statistics store with
the command line tool <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">bcfg2-build-reports</span></tt>.</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>Nodes Digest</li>
<li>Nodes Individual</li>
<li>Overview Statistics</li>
<li>Performance</li>
</ul>
<p>The data generated by these reports can be delivered by several
mechanisms:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>HTML</li>
<li>Email</li>
<li>RSS</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="section" id="shortcomings-and-planned-enhancements">
<h2>Shortcomings and Planned Enhancements<a class="headerlink" href="#shortcomings-and-planned-enhancements" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>When designing the current reporting system, we were overly concerned with
the potential explosion in data size over time. In order to address this,
we opted to use the retention scheme described above. This approach has
several shortcomings:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>A comprehensive list of reconfiguration operations (with associated
timestamps) isn’t retained</li>
<li>Client results for any given day (except the last one) aren’t uniformly
retained. This means that inter-client analysis is difficult, if
not impossible</li>
</ul>
<p>We plan to move to a database backend to address the dataset size
problem and start retaining all information. The move to a SQL backend
will allow many more types of queries to be efficiently processed. It
will also make on-demand reports simpler.</p>
<p>Other sorts of information would also be useful to track. We plan to
add the ability to tag a particular configuration element as security
related, and include this in reports. This will aid in the effective
prioritization of manual and failed reconfiguration tasks.</p>
<div class="section" id="capability-goals-posed-as-questions">
<h3>Capability Goals (posed as questions)<a class="headerlink" href="#capability-goals-posed-as-questions" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
<ul class="simple">
<li>What machines have not yet applied critical updates?</li>
<li>How long did critical updates take to be applied?</li>
<li>What configuration did machine X have on a particular date?</li>
<li>When did machine X perform configuration update Y?</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sphinxsidebar">
<div class="sphinxsidebarwrapper">
<h3><a href="../index.html">Table Of Contents</a></h3>
<ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#">Bcfg2 Static Reporting System</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#goals">Goals</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#retention-model">Retention Model</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#setup">Setup</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#output">Output</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#shortcomings-and-planned-enhancements">Shortcomings and Planned Enhancements</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#capability-goals-posed-as-questions">Capability Goals (posed as questions)</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Previous topic</h4>
<p class="topless"><a href="index.html"
title="previous chapter">The Bcfg2 Reporting System</a></p>
<h4>Next topic</h4>
<p class="topless"><a href="dynamic.html"
title="next chapter">Bcfg2 Web Reporting System</a></p>
<h3>This Page</h3>
<ul class="this-page-menu">
<li><a href="../_sources/reports/static.txt"
rel="nofollow">Show Source</a></li>
</ul>
<div id="searchbox" style="display: none">
<h3>Quick search</h3>
<form class="search" action="../search.html" method="get">
<input type="text" name="q" />
<input type="submit" value="Go" />
<input type="hidden" name="check_keywords" value="yes" />
<input type="hidden" name="area" value="default" />
</form>
<p class="searchtip" style="font-size: 90%">
Enter search terms or a module, class or function name.
</p>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">$('#searchbox').show(0);</script>
</div>
</div>
<div class="clearer"></div>
</div>
<div class="related">
<h3>Navigation</h3>
<ul>
<li class="right" style="margin-right: 10px">
<a href="../genindex.html" title="General Index"
>index</a></li>
<li class="right" >
<a href="../py-modindex.html" title="Python Module Index"
>modules</a> |</li>
<li class="right" >
<a href="dynamic.html" title="Bcfg2 Web Reporting System"
>next</a> |</li>
<li class="right" >
<a href="index.html" title="The Bcfg2 Reporting System"
>previous</a> |</li>
<li><a href="../index.html">home</a> | </li>
<!--<li><a href="../search.html">search</a> | </li>-->
<li><a href="../help/index.html">help</a> | </li>
<li><a href="../contents.html">documentation </a> »</li>
<li><a href="../contents.html" >Bcfg2 documentation 1.3.0</a> »</li>
<li><a href="index.html" >The Bcfg2 Reporting System</a> »</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="footer">
© Copyright 2009-2013, Narayan Desai.
Last updated on Mar 20, 2013.
Created using <a href="http://sphinx.pocoo.org/">Sphinx</a> 1.1.3.
</div>
</body>
</html>
distrib
>
Fedora
>
17
>
i386
>
media
>
updates
>
by-pkgid
>
b50d8ee6d7871fcc13c0677a9364ed59
>
files
>
411
