Zenoss has recognized my write-up on email based event acknowledgment as their November 2009 Tip of the Month! Many thanks to Zenoss’ Community Manager, Matt Ray, for the tip of the hat! Also, big thanks to Zenoss community member Rodrique Heron. He put in a lot of effort to test it out and give feedback for enhancements and bug fixes.
I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with data mining and presentation. Specifically, I’ve been parsing Nagios log files to gather outage statistics and do trending on the data. I came across the amazing Matplotlib in my search for Python graphing modules. I’m sure anyone who does coding and graphing in the scientific community has used this tool. I wrote a pretty useful wrapper to graph date plots and I thought I’d share it.
Quick update… I developed this script on an earlier version of Zenoss Core. I’ve made some small tweaks so it’s compatible with the latest release of Zenoss Core (tested on 2.4.5 & 2.5.0). I’ve also removed a section that had a Zenoss patch that is no longer necessary.
Thanks to some feedback from Rodrique Heron, I’ve also updated this to handle base64 encoded and multipart emails properly. He was trying to use this from a Blackberry device, but it wasn’t working properly due to the base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding. It was also failing on multipart email messages from his outlook client.
I just ran into this one and thought someone else might find it useful. I was trying to compile rrdtool under Centos5 x86_64 so that I could have access to the perl libraries. It seems like rrdtool can get confused when looking for dependencies. First, install the dependencies via yum:
# yum install cairo-devel libxml2-devel pango-devel pango libpng-devel freetype freetype-devel libart_lgpl-devel
Then set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable to point to the 64-bit pkgconfig directory:
export PKG_CONFIG_DIR=/usr/lib64/pkgconfig
Run configure with the –libdir flag:
./configure --libdir=/usr/lib64
You should now be able to cleanly compile the 64-bit version of rrdtool.
Recently I’ve been developing a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) to help drive automation and provisioning of systems. I first started by designing a database to model our Datacenter and all the assets that we need to manage within it. I did this by hand, using MySQL and then built a CGI front-end to it using Python. As I got deeper and needed to make changes, I started to see how much of a pain this was going to be to maintain and develop.
Luckily I was pointed in the direction of a Java Web Application framework called Grails. If you haven’t heard of it or used it, I highly suggest checking it out. I’m not a Java guy, but it only took me two weeks to really come up to speed with Grails. My favorite parts of grails are the ORM (Object Relational Mapper) that abstracts the database interaction from SQL into objects and methods. I’ve also enjoyed messing with the AJAX functionality (prototype and scriptaculous).
Within three weeks, I’ve developed a management tool that is gaining functionality every week. It’s not to the point where I’d release it unto the world, but hopefully I can get it there sooner than later. I’ll be posting some how-to’s on some issues I faced with AJAX and creating my UI.
This morning I was browsing through my Google Code home page that I’d forgotten about. I came across a tool I wrote to migrate Trac databases to CSV for import into Jira. I figured it might be useful for some of you if you are moving away from Trac to Jira. Enjoy!
It’s been quite a while since I posted anything. I was in limbo for a while personally (planning a wedding) and professionally. After three months of unemployment, I landed a contract as a tools developer for an energy technology company, Silver Spring Networks. We provide a full end-to-end Smart Grid solution for power utilities. I’ve since been hired full-time and I’m back into the swing of things. We’re looking to migrate our Nagios monitoring over to Zenoss. With that said, stay tuned for more articles on Zenoss. We’re hoping to do some really cool things like leveraging the Zenoss CMDB, via the ZODB, to do command dispatch automation with ControlTier.
The Blue Angels and all the other crazy pilots put on an amazing show over the weekend. Here’s some shots I took from my roof. 
I worked from home today and heard the Blue Angels out and about practicing. I took some rooftop shots from my apartment. This is my favorite shot. I can’t wait for the real show on Saturday and Sunday!
About a month ago, I wrote a detailed how-to on implementing email based event acknowledgment, in Zenoss. This feature is sorely missing from a lot of “Enterprise Grade” network monitoring systems. I decided to extend Zenoss and write my own. Have a look at my detailed how-to.