Forum Discussion
The goal essentially is to allow a client to run a command on a switch without logging in and of course receive the output as it is. We look after and manage devices for clients and we hold the rights to the configuration and as such clients cannot log into devices. One of the commands that clients would often call up to have the information for is the display mac-address (on Huawei) this allows them to see what connected devices are on what interface. It is somewhat tricky as there is no real appropriate OID to use that would work, the closest I have come (which does work) is this .1.3.6.1.2.1.17.4.3.1.1 (dot1dTpFdbAddress) as the SNMP OID and the interface index as the description .1.3.6.1.2.1.17.4.3.1.2. This works but then you get a lot of instances with a singular number as the interface it is connected to as its description which may look messy but, it is searchable.
The other option is have it as a script datasource and the user can go to it and "Poll Now" and get the raw output infront of them. This looks nice and they can then extrapolate the data somewhere else but it is not searchable. If the raw output could be displayed on a widget that would be cool but ultimately would start to compete against configsources to some degree. On the topic of configsources I could ultimately just make one that does the aforementioned script and that would work wonders and I could in future make a nice script which grabs a lot more (which would be awesome!) however I run into a RBAC problem where we don't allow them to see the configsource due to config ownership. If I had more granular RBAC over datasources/confgsources (mainly configsources) I could produce some amazing tools for our clients.