Hi,
We had to build a system that would do something similar with what you're asking for. We had to give support for QoS for Cisco ME3400 and Cisco 6500. These were not providing the QoS information over SNMP, instead using CLI. Basically it's the same situation as yours.
This is how we did it:
- new import module created in eHealth.
- custom element types for this information to be imported in eHealth.
- custom collector that would connect to each 3400 and 6500, extract the information using CLI, produce DCI and DDI files, importing it after in eHealth. This is actually written in Java, to speed up everything and have better control.
- Trend/TopN reports created based on the data that is fed into the system.
Input for the collector that we're using is the list of interfaces that have QoS information enabled exported from eHealth system. Basically we have a group that contains all the interfaces that should be monitored for QoS information using CLI. All elements of type interface in that group (TO_MONITOR_QOS) are candidates for QoS data collection.
It's not fully automated, as you have to import new DDI files once changes are made to the list of monitored interfaces (addition specially). There is an importSample module created just as an example on how an Import Module should be created in eHealth. You can create in the TCL script used in the module some kind of logic to automate also import of DDI files once the import module runs. The same applies for exporting contents of the group (TO_MONITOR_QOS), you can create an schedule eHealth job that will export all contents of the group in the right folder, where the collector reads the input data. At the time of the implementation we choose to do it like this, not 100% automated. There's always room for improvement.
We choose one of the existing element types as based for ours.
Catalin.