pymon Sprinting at PyCon 2006

pycon :: pymon :: networking :: programming

For the past two days, I've been working on a Cisco-inspired shell for
pymon. The purpose being: provide a user interface familiar to network
engineers, allowing them to update/control a running pymon instance.
Ravi and I worked on the shell last year, with Ravi writing a
pyparsing
grammar. However, since then, the specs have evolved considerably: they
are now much better defined and understood. As a result of these
changes, I had to chuck the old code and start over. Which isn't a bad
thing, especially since we didn't get very far. Things have gone very
well and I am excited about the direction and rapid movement.

Here's the current status of the current pyparsing grammar work:

complete

• node (add, update, del, etc.)


• memory (write, clear)


• show (nodes, services, lists)

almost done

• services (add, update, del, etc.)

not started

• lists (email/notification list management)

During lunch today,
Sean
Reifschneider from
tummy.com
had some great input and had the following requests:

• acknowledgments via web gui (and maybe also email? irc?)


• scheduled downtime (existing feature)


• dependencies (e.g., if the router is down, only notify about the
  router and not all the hosts behind the router) -- because of they way
  I have designed the rules engine, I don't think this will be too
  difficult... and I may even be able to use the NetCIDR package I wrote
  for CoyMon to do this very cleanly


• read-only SNMP (gets for remote load average and disk usage); this
  should be fairly trivial. We might be able to push this out with the
  next release. It will just use the local agent, like ping does


• escalations (partially implemented)


• zsh-like functionality in pymon shell (tab-completion at least)

This gives the project some nice near-term focus which we will be
working on once I restructure the factories and clients and add unit
tests for twisted.trial.