Build a plugin out of another

Question

Hi everyone.
Anyone knows if one can develop a plugin using another one as a base?
For example: I've deployed Sybase ASE plugin and then I noticed I could add some metrics, reports, audit or functions that somehow feel missing for the kind of monitoring I use to do.
Could I use that plugin as a base to develop a new one with the things I need? and in that case, would I need to obtain the plugin sources or it's enough with the deployable file to start building from there?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Well, that depends on the scope of what you intend to monitor and your familiarity with writing plug-ins. If you're using the plug-in as the basis for your new target type and are merely adding a few metrics and maybe a report or two, it shouldn't take more than a couple weeks for an accomplished user. If there is something of a learning curve to overcome, then it will probably be longer.
If you are using the original target type as a template and are designing another full target type, there will be a lot more work involved. It helps to design beforehand all of the important data to collect (metric columns), how to group it (metrics), how to collect it (which fetchlet/what scripts to write), and how often to collect/thresholds (default collection file). Of course, this isn't the reality of how a development usually happens. We implement one metric and then another and then another... etc. but you get the idea. There's a lot more information parsing when you are building all of the metrics for yourself.
That sets the basis for the information you'll use when you write reports. The reports serve as the surrogate UI since no real custom UI option is available. These can be as complex or as simple (or nonexistent) as you like.
And you can implement job types as an administration piece for your target type.
If you were doing a full implementation such as this, it would probably be more on the order of months, the number of which depending on how much information you want to collect and how many reports you want to write.
And I don't know anyone who really builds a plug-in from scratch. It always helps to have examples to use (either from the extensibility guide, another plug-in, or something you've already done for your own plug-in). Sorry if this isn't really as definitive an answer as you had hoped for...