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Friday March 29, 2024

pymon

Second Release Candidate is Out

[ 2005.12.24]  Happy Kwanza, everyone -- we are super excited about being able to share pymon publicly, in time for the Holidays. No ribbons or bright wrapping paper, but how about painlessly monitoring thousands of hosts :-) Thanks to the Twisted Framework and pymon, you can do just that. We've made all kinds of little improvements during the past week, unplanned improvements that happned organically as a result of everyone pitching in. The web UI got a little spice with sortable columns thanks to MochiKit, logging has been greatly improved and is configurable with standard log levels; on-the-fly configuration changes (without a pymon restart) are now supported, allowing administrators to effortlessly disable serice checks or enter new maintenance/downtime windows.

Be sure to check out the new screenshot showing off pretty colors, MochiKit-sorted services, and (more subtly), Apache as a Virtual Host front on the project site.

All in all, we're very excited, and it looks like we'll meet our goal of a full release before the New Year :-)

First Public Release Imminent

[ 2005.12.18]  No, really! We mean it this time! Seriously, we are days away from a release. We will first have a couple pre-releases, available to the curious and the stout-hearted. When those pass muster, we'll push one up to PyPI. Watch this space for more info...

pymon Embraces ZConfig

[ 2005.12.17]  After many, many discussions about configuration schemes and many implementations (one in particular was complete and being used by pymon), we finally bailed on the home-grown stuff and went with the Apache-style configuration that ZConfig provides. The primary motivation for the switch was the API: it's clean and it's pythonic. The primary motivation behind the swtich as a whole (no matter what we swtiched to) was maintenance. A custom configuration scheme is a whole 'nother code base to maintain on top of pymon.The added benefit with ZConfig is its growing adoption and wide use.

pymon Patterns Refactor Branch Merged into Trunk

[ 2005.06.13]  As of this weekend, the branch code we've been working on for the past couple months is merged with trunk. We are on the final stretch for the 0.3.3 alpha release. With this alpha release will be improved developer docs and public subversion access (r/o). Hang tight, folks -- we're almost there!

pymon Branch Now Has Integrated HTTP Service

[ 2005.05.22]  Today, a couple of us did some work together on the pymon code, and made some nifty changes. The most obvious change was the addition of a Nevow web service to pymon; a pymon instance now serves HTTP on port 8080. This will present a great deal of information to pymon managers in the future, but right now we will only be displaying all service states, like you see in products such as NetCool.

The second change which is very important to me :-) is a slight refactoring of pymon.tac which makes the code cleaner and completely unifies the application and monitors. "I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be too keen. He's alreade got one. It's vera nice."

Excellent Refactor Progress

[ 2005.05.19]  This is been a big week for pymon. A great deal of fruitful discussion has taken place on the maillist and the conversations and analyses have resulted in clean, clear code. Solutions are good. Workflow and the state machine have now been successfully coupled which has paved the way for work on in-memoery caching/queuing. The queue will be be accessed by the storage API and thus all storage implementations (for those who want to archive monitored results and transition data). The queue will also be accessed by a failsafe mechanism that will write data stored in the queue to disk at regular internals. In the event of something like a powerfailure, this failsafe data will be loaded into pymon as it is brought back online.

Our refactorings are taking place with precision and care, resulting in no broken code. It's a wonderful thing to be in the middle of a refactor and still be able to run your application ;-)

We've also begun simplifying the process of developing additional service monitors for pymon. Once complete (very soon!), this will greatly increase our productivity and allow us to start adding a much richer set of features.

Added Workflow to pymon

[ 2005.05.07]  Workflow has been added to pymon for the purpose of consolidating and organizing control over service states as well as transitions between service states. This greatly simplifies some of the pymon internals and is already making development and testing easier. We believe production deployments will gain just as much.

Upgraded to Twisted 2.0 Support

[ 2005.04.08]  We are now developing under Twisted 2.0, using the Zope 3 interfaces to build adaptors.

API Restructuring

[ 2005.04.06]  After a couple weeks of discussion on the mail list and prototyping code, we've begun making excellent progress on the pymon APIs. Currently, of paramount importance is the configuration API. We are using Twisted components and interfaces (Twisted interfaces are actually from Zope3) to write adaptors for various configuration sources, and this is helping invaluably with the refactoring of the internal configuation API. We are moving to formal API definitions with interfaces and the code is becoming far cleaner. With this work done, the ability to configure alternative data stores and message formats will be much easier; pymon will be operating at its highest level and development will resume with an increased pace.

Additionally, by taking the time right now, we are avoiding a future refactoring. We are being clear and careful, doing our best to design wisely and with forethought. This is especially important with the recent interest that has been shown in pymon by both other developers in the open source community as well as business seeking to have us implement this as part of their tool sets.

Twisted Branch Merged into Trunk

[ 2005.03.29]  Finally, after speding almost half a year in its own branch, the Twisted rewrite of pymon was merged today. The primary reason for this was that all development on trunk had ceased, since the twisted path was going so well and was the one that everyone was interested in developing. We've been engaging in a great deal of discussion on the near-term development strategy for pymon, especially in regards to APIs and interfaces. There are lots of cool ideas in the offing... stay tuned!

New pymon Maillist Is Up

[ 2005.03.20]  Well, after the Great Winter Server Disaster of '05, we've got mail back up and running. In addition, we've got the new pymon maillist running. It's nice to be posting to a list again... I'd forgotten how integral they are to my development process.

Progress on Twisted Branch

[ 2005.03.09]  Ravi and Duncan have been working on pymon again, getting the alpha branch rewritten using twisted up and running. They've also been discussing vision for the future, feature additions, and an end-user API. For the second alpha "release", we're looking at stablizing the ping checks, HTTP status checks, and data storage.

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