Notes on ScopePort

Lennart just pushed a new rake task to master: graphfactory[:all|:hosts|:services]

Use it to generate all graphs at once – It is highly recommended  to use this task as a cronjob to avoid extremely long page generation times of host and service detail views.

Sample output:

$ rake graphfactory:all
=== Service 'Google' ===
Last stored value is from Sun Feb 07 01:29:51 +0100 2010
Inserting 240 values into RRD...
=== Service 'ScopePort SMTP' ===
Last stored value is from Sun Feb 07 01:29:36 +0100 2010
Inserting 36 values into RRD...
=== Service 'ScopePort SSH' ===
Last stored value is from Sun Feb 07 01:30:47 +0100 2010
Inserting 22 values into RRD...
=== Host 'scopeport.org' ===
 	== Graph: cpuload ==
	Last stored value is from Sat Jan 23 22:16:28 +0100 2010
	Inserting 13038 values into RRD...
 	== Graph: disk-read-ops ==
	Last stored value is from Fri Dec 04 03:39:41 +0100 2009
	Inserting 4347 values into RRD...
 	== Graph: disk-write-ops ==
	Last stored value is from Fri Dec 04 03:39:41 +0100 2009
	Inserting 4347 values into RRD...
 	== Graph: free-memory ==
	Last stored value is from Sat Jan 23 22:19:28 +0100 2010
	Inserting 4347 values into RRD...
 	== Graph: open-files ==
	Last stored value is from Sat Jan 23 22:19:28 +0100 2010
	Inserting 4346 values into RRD...
 	== Graph: processes ==
	Last stored value is from Sat Jan 23 22:18:28 +0100 2010
	Inserting 4347 values into RRD...

I am happy to announce the release of ScopePort version 0.3-dev. There is no packaged version, because this is still a pre-alpha development release. A lot of people already successfully installed ScopePort on their systems and had no problems so far. Use the installation guides to install ScopePort directly from out git repositories. Note that ScopePort is not yet feature complete as planned for the first real release. I am still working a lot on the whole system.

A few screenshots of the current state of the host monitoring parts:

Host details I

Host details II

Host details III

Defining sensor conditions for a host

High availability/Clustering configuration

Some replies of ScopePort users I am very happy about:

Cheers, it looks great, can’t wait to deploy it myself

WOW! Very slick, easy to navigate, great colors, very professional looking app

Clear and professional web interface! very nice work! Did you do all the CSS working as well? very cool one. I can’t wait to test the server side and see how much customized alerts that I can setup. Plus the graph looks very good

I like to know when the app is ready for beta testing, we have looked at allot of apps, yours has allot of potential to meet our needs.

I just wanted to say that the ScopePort project is looking great.

This is what you get immediately after somebody declared an emergency and selected a notification group you are a member of:

Email notification

XMPP/Jabber notification

SMS notification

The emergency view in the web interface

Usually the Rails SMTP configuration takes place in config/environment.rb like this:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
  :port => 587,
  :domain => "domain.com",
  :user_name => "user@domain.com",
  :password => "password",
  :authentication => :plain
}

ScopePort already has a Email settings part in the setup section where all the required SMTP settings are stored. I wanted to fetch the SMTP configuration from the database to avoid double configuration. I stumbled over this blog post after a while: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/using-multiple-smtp-accounts-w.html Based on this I developed the following dynamic way to define the SMTP settings:

class EmergencyMailer < ActionMailer::Base   
  def load_settings
    @@smtp_settings = {
      :address => Setting.first.mail_server,
      :port => Setting.first.mail_port,
      :domain => Setting.first.mail_hostname,
      :authentication => :plain,
      :user_name => Setting.first.mail_user,
      :password =>Setting.first.mail_pass
    }
  end
 
  def emergency_notification(emergency, email)
    load_settings
    recipients  email
    from        Setting.first.mail_from
    subject     "[ScopePort] An emergency has been declared!"
    sent_on     Time.now
    body        :emergency => emergency
  end
end

The method load_settings gets called by the delivery method and fills the smtp_settings instance variable with parameters from the database.

Check out this Rails Guide if you want to learn more about ActionMailer: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailer_basics.html

Lennart just commited (1, 2, 3) the new emergency system. In the ScopePort settings defined people will be notified about the emergency if you declare one. You can then coordinate countermeasures with your co-workers in the emergency detail view. There are the common comments (like in the service monitoring module) and even a real time chat! The ScopePort logo is pulsating and there is a big message if there are active emergencies. You just can’t miss them – Even if you don’t check your notifications. (Emergency service, anyone? )

Declaring an emergency

Emergency detail view with active chat

(The emergency comments are still missing in these screenshots)

ScopePort can now help you find out why a XMPP or SMTP notification did not reach you. You can enable a debug mode in the settings of the specific notification method:

All logged conversations can be investigated in the “Notification method debugging” section:

These commits by Lennart added the new features: