Status?

[Scott Brooke]

Duncan,

Just re-discovered CoyMon and saw the news about Ver3.  Very cool!

In response to a post from the old mailing list, I'm a network geek and I'd be happy to help with understanding things from that point of view.

I'm very interested in seeing this come to fruition so anything I can do to help, just let me know.

I'm happy to test and I have Cisco routers and switches both at home and the office for testing purposes.

Thanks for doing this!

Scott

[Duncan McGreggor]

Scott, good to hear from you :-) And your enthusiasm is most welcome and motivating!

That's great that you're into helping out on the network side. Let's see, what's the status... the status is that I wish I could work on CoyMon and pymon (a general monitoring solution; see http://projects.adytum.us/tracs/PyMonitor and http://groups.google.com/group/pymon for more info) full time!

The most recent work has all been focused on the supporting libraries:
* PyRRD is functional with most everything I need (it doesn't yet support some of the esoteric functionality of the RRDTool API)
* PyFlowCatch is in-progress, with most of the work still being done in my sandbox ( e.g. trunk/sandbox/oubiwann/flowcatch.py -- you can see this on the web in the trac wiki by clicking on the "browse source" link)
* I haven't touched any of the front-end stuff yet, but that won't be too big a deal as it's all stuff I've done before (as opposed to re-writing the perl FlowScan stuff!)

I actually found out that there is a bunch of functionality in flow-tools that we can really take advatage of... looks like some of the stuff that the old perl code (FlowScan, etc.) was doing. flow-tools is written in C (I think! Maybe C++? I forget) so it will be much, much faster for stuff like that. It also has RRD functionality, but that is very limited so we will be using the object-oriented goodness of PyRRD.

Oh, speaking of that, one of the demos in the PyRRD project is graphing NetFlow data from a software exporter I have installed on my local network at home.

flow-tools, PyFlowCatch, and PyRRD are the three core chunks of CoyMon, and really the brains of the outfit. The most work needs to be done on PyFlowCatch as well as more tightly integrating flow-tools functionality. Once these three are working together seamlessly to create flow files, RRD file, RRD graphs, and top-talker reports, we're ready for UI work :-)

I amost forgot: the CoyMon object broker has also received some attention (not committed to svn yet). I'm looking at using a JSON-RPC server I wrote in twisted that will be much lighter. I've put some time into planning an approach for a pure TCP version of the server that doesn't send over HTTP, and is thus even lighter.

However, the thing that is really exciting about this is usability. These components are already working so well together and they are SO much more light weight that their perl grandparents. Installation should be magically simple compared to what it was like to get CoyMon 2 running (which the VA is *still* using!).

So, that's about it :-) Here are some links, in case you missed anything while browsing the project site:

http://projects.adytum.us/tracs/CoyMon
http://projects.adytum.us/tracs/PyFlowCatch
http://projects.adytum.us/tracs/PyRRD
http://projects.adytum.us/tracs/PyRRD/wiki/FullWorkingExamples (Example 5)

Oh dear, it looks like my recent upgrade of trac has changed the large images from links to the actual image itself...

Thanks for the email! And I look forward to having you test stuff for the project :-)

d