Over the years I've been doing systems administration, I've spent a lot of time (really, quite a lot) writing tools that pull data from Nagios or try to make it do what I want. Command line apps to schedule downtimes, IRC bots that parrot alerts, email/SMS gateways, status web pages, etc etc.
Every time I take on a project like this, I usually go through three phases: first: lamenting that I don't have the code from the last time I did it, second: weeping over the atrocious mid-90s look, feel, and implementation of Nagios, and finally: actually sitting down and doing whatever it is I need to do.
It's time to cut out the first two steps. Enter nagios-api: a REST-like, JSON API for Nagios. This allows you to quickly and easily build command line tools, web interfaces, and other code that interfaces with Nagios - without having to actually interface with Nagios. Leave that to me.
If you want to go check it out now, the code is available here:
https://github.com/xb95/nagios-api
Right now it's fairly simple and only lets you do a few things: get the state (enough to implement a status page), schedule/cancel downtimes (90% of what I have to do from the command line anyway), and tail the log (the final 10% of what I'm typically up to).
This is implemented on top of the Diesel framework by Jamie Turner et al. Since coming to Bump and discovering Diesel, implementing this kind of network/loop driven system in Python has gone from 'annoying' to 'so easy I can do it in my sleep'. Seriously good stuff.
Future plans: add a lot more functionality, of course. There are many verbs in the Nagios language and I want to be able to support most or all of them. I'm sure much of that will come as I need to implement them, and of course, from contributions by other people.
And finally, of course, I want to replace Nagios with an entirely new system. I've been doing some work on that on the side, but I'll talk about that another day. Ideally, whatever interface the nagios-api project settles on will be translatable to the new replacement monitoring system I'm working on. That way any tools written against this API will just continue to work against whatever the other system is when it's done.
Feedback is, as always, very welcome.