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copied!<p>I'm contemplating how to go about this myself, and I think this is one of the key pieces of infrastructure that not having around keeps us in the dark ages. Hopefully this will be a popular question on serverfault.com. :)</p> <p>It's not just that you could install a single tool to collect this data, because that's not possible cheaply, but ideally you want everything from the hardware up to the applications on the network feeding into this thing.</p> <p>I think the only approach that makes sense is a modular one. The range of devices and types of information is too disparate to come under a single tool. Also the collection of data needs to be as passive and asynchronous as possible - the reality of running infrastructure means that there will be interruptions and you can't rely on being able to get the data at all times.</p> <p>I think the tools you've pointed out form something of an ecosystem that could work together - Cobbler can install from bare-metal and hand over to Puppet, which has support for generating Nagios configs, and storing configs in a database; for me only Cacti is a bit opaque in terms of programmatically inserting new devices, templates etc. but I know this is possible.</p> <p>Ultimately you have to sit down and work out which pieces of information are important for the business you work for, and design a db schema around that. Then, work out how to get the information you need into the db, whether it's from Facter, Nagios, Cacti, or direct snmp calls.</p> <p>Since you asked about collection of data, I think if you have quite disparate kit (Dell, HP etc.) then it makes sense to create a library to abstract away as much as possible the differences between them, so your scripts just make standard calls such as "checkdiskhealth". When you add new hardware you can add to the library rather than having to write a completely new script. </p>

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