[squid-dev] Squid-Cache statistics reporting project

[Alex Rousskov]

On 4/20/22 18:34, Eliezer Croitoru wrote:

> In the past I wrote about a project that will include Squid statistics 
> reporting.
> 
> The main goal is to gather from the project users using a script a set 
> of cache-mgr pages in specific intervals.
> 
> The simplest way to do so is to run a script that will use either a 
> token and will upload the files to an api/webdav/sftp or via email and a 
> whitelist of emails.
> 
> I would like to RFC this specific idea.

Just to avoid misunderstanding: If "this idea" refers to offering your 
script to Squid users that want to participate in your project, then you 
do not need a squid-dev blessing for doing that because that idea does 
not require any Squid modifications.

If you are proposing Squid modifications, then please detail those 
modifications. I hope it does not come to Squid duplicating crontab and 
sendmail functionality :-).


> I can offer to write a cache-mgr to yaml/json converter script that will 
> create a singe json/yaml file that will contain all the details of the 
> instance.

As a personal project, that converter sounds good to me! FWIW, I have 
heard of 3rd party tools[1] that parse Squid cache manager output, but I 
do not know how suitable they are for what you want to achieve. The best 
output format would depend on how you plan to post-process data, but 
once you get something that follows strict grammar, it should be fairly 
easy to convert to other formats as needed. I would just keep the 
converter script output as simple and strict as possible to facilitate 
further conversions and input in various post-processing tools.

[1] https://github.com/boynux/squid-exporter

As an official Squid project, I think it would be much better to finish 
converting cache manager code to produce YAML output natively than to 
develop and maintain an official converter script (while still working 
on that native YAML conversion).


> This option will significantly help the project to grasp a little bit 
> about the usage of squid around the world and to get a glimpse into the 
> unknown.

Personally, I am worried that glimpses based on a few 
volunteer-submitted samples are more likely to mislead than to correctly 
guide Squid development, but that speculation cannot be proven.


Cheers,

Alex.