[Twisted-Python] Custom app using twisted

Duncan McGreggor duncan at adytumsolutions.com
Sat May 15 00:54:04 EDT 2004


Don't know if this belongs on the list or not...

I've just written a python monitoring program for baby-sitting a bunch 
of servers (I wanted something easier to setup and maintain than 
Nagios)... but the inevitable has happened, and I want to make a 
go-cart run like a ferrari. I was thinking of using python's interface 
to 'select' a la Medusa, but as soon as I saw 'import asyncore', I 
thought "There's got to be a better way..."

Enter twisted.

I would like to be able to run n monitoring instances simultaneously 
(thus my interest in 'select') to make the code as close to real-time 
as is practical. However, this is my first dive into POSIX I/O at this 
level (I ordered a copy of "UNIX Systems Programming" (Robbins) 
yesterday, to help me learn and adjust).

* The monitoring libs that I've put together do everything from local 
process monitoring (crap like ps with commands.getoutput), httplib 
checks against sites, process checks on remote servers (ssh+ps with 
commands.getoutput), ping checks, etc.
* An instance of the monitoring class will only do one type of 
monitoring (either process check, remote process check, ping check, or 
site check)

I would like to write a version of this that's a twisted application, 
in the hopes that it will be more robust and enterprise-ready. I've 
started looking at the following:
twisted.application.service.IProcess
twisted.application.service.Process
and spawnProcess from twisted.internet.default.PosixReactorBase

But I am not sure how to get started yet... I want to write something 
that can be run with twistd. Can anyone offer guidance or suggestions 
as to the approach? Right now, I am locked on the example here: 
http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/howto/application.html ... 
Is this what I should be looking at for inspiration? Or another 
approach all together? I've not come across examples of twisted apps 
that are a narrow specialization like what I have in mind... the app 
would be a *kind* of server... that would regularly spawn processes and 
wait for return data, regularly instantiate python monitoring classes.

Am I thinking of this in a sane way?

Thanks for any input,

Duncan



--
Duncan M. McGreggor        mailto:duncan at adytum.us
Systems &                  p 301.698.5032
Applications Engineer      http://adytum.us
AdytumSolutions, Inc. 
      





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