We would like a feature in RHQ such that an admin can completely disable or ignore a resource type from being managed. For example, suppose I do not want to manage any Postgres databases. I should be able to go to the Administration page and "disable" the postgres plugin's resource type for Postgres database servers (which should also disable child types). Would also be nice to completely disable a plugin, which could be as simple as saying, "all resource types defined by this plugin are to be ignored".

A possible solution is as follows:

a) have an admin page that gives you a list of all resource types and you select the ones you want to "ignore"
b) when an inventory report comes in, have it completely ignore/not process those resources of an "ignored" type (DiscoveryBossBean.mergeInventoryReport would be where this would be done). So the resource won't even make it into inventory if its of an ignored type
c) have the two "updateInventoryStatus" and/or "setResourceStatus" in ResourceManagerBean to ignore the request and not do anything if the status to change to is COMMITTED and the resource's type is an "ignored" type (this would only be necessary for those resources that were already discovered before the types were ignored - in this case, the resources would remain in the NEW status - probably not a good thing to have resources always in the NEW status - maybe when you mark a type as "ignored" in a) we go through and purge all resources of that type.

The whole idea, therefore, is to not have the resources in inventory at all (if they are one of the "ignored" resource types). If you can be assured only the resources in RHQ_RESOURCE are valid, unignored types, then everything else works fine as-is.

The only question then becomes, how do you tell the agent that it should remove resources it discovered from its internal inventory? Perhaps the return value of mergeInventoryReport is a List<Resouce> of those resources that were not merged and should be purged from the agent inventory. I'm not sure I have a good handle on how this particular issue should work and I would like a discussion in this JIRA to flush this out.