pyother

pyother is a set of small, reusable code snippets which I could not find in other python modules.

Project Setup

In order to use pyother following dependencies have to be installed:

• yaml bindings for python (http://pyyaml.org/)
• python 2.7 or python >=3.2

In order to send event to Riemann, few more libraries are needed:

• Bernhard - Riemann client library (https://github.com/banjiewen/bernhard)
• Google's protobuf library
• dnspython library (http://www.dnspython.org/)

You can also use debian packaging rules from debian/ directory to build a deb package.

Usage

The script module contains four classes:

• the RecoverableException and FatalException exceptions are used to differentiate local exections, generated by the script.
• the ScriptConfiguration class is a simple configuration file handler. Based on yaml it allows to handle complex structures and translate them directly to Python objects. It does not do any config params verification.
• ScriptLock is a simple locking facility using fcntl call.

The monitoring module ATM contains only ScriptStatus class. Its meant to provide easy interface to sending events to NRPE/Riemann monitoring agents. It performs event aggregation, Riemman connection handling and logging. Four methods are available:

• initialize
• update - push event into the class's internal storage but do not sent it now. When all the events are submitted - send them all in an aggregated form.
• notify_agregated - send all the events submitted via update method, in an aggregated role
• _notify\immediate - discard all the events currently stored and send immediatelly an event provided via method call.

It should be noted that there are differences betwean Riemann and NRPE event sending - by design, _notify\immediate and _notify\agregated terminates the script when NRPE functionality is enabled whereas Riemann-only setup enables sending more than one event.

An event is a status-message pair. Status is one of ("ok","crit", "warning', "unknown") levels of the event and the message is a free-form text describing the event.

By event aggregation it is understood that the status is only raised up (ok->crit->warning->unknown), and the message is concatenated.

For more detailed information please check pydoc documentation - all classes/methods and their arguments are well documented. By convention all private methods/fields are prefixed with "_" and should not be accessed/used directly.

Contributing

All patches are welcome ! Please use Github issue tracking and/or create a pull request. Also, please try to adhere to Google coding standards:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.html#Default_Argument_Values

Testing

Currenlty the unittest python library is used to perform all the testing. In test/ directory you can find:

• modules/ - modules used by unittests
• moduletests/ - the unittests themselves
• fabric/ - sample input files
• output_coverage_html/ - coverage tests results in a form of an html webpage

Unittests can be started either by using nosetest command:

pyother/ (master✗) # nosetests
[20:33:02]
......
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 6 tests in 0.449s

OK

or by issuing the run_tests.py command:

pyother/ (master✗) # run_tests.py
[20:33:04]
......
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 6 tests in 0.362s

OK

The difference is that the run_tests.py takes care of generating coverage reports for you.

All the dependencies required for performing the unittests are decribed in debian packaging scripts and are as follows:

• unittests2 (in case of python2)
• coverage
• python-mock , plus all the dependencies mentioned in 'Project Setup' section.