layer8

A datacenter decommissioning last year gave me access to some old Netbotz (now APC) monitoring gear. I jumped at the chance to save it from the garbage, as I remembered it being a pretty slick way to get basic environmental data (temp, door switches, etc.) and it was a small physical footprint way to control a number of networked cameras at once.

My recollection was right, and while the management server appliance proved both annoying to work with and massive overkill for my home projects, I’ve had some luck scraping data out of its web UI.

I wrote a few python classes to make it reasonable to programmatically access the data generated by the cameras and sensors in my backyard chicken coop; you can see the end result at pachube.

The code is available here.  It’s driven by a small db schema that holds basic location info for the monitoring gear and metadata about sensors being watched (e.g. polling intervals and alert thresholds), and produces simple name/value pairs with sensor data satisfying given conditions.  By “conditions” here I mean things like “it’s time to report this sensor value” or “this value changed too much, so I’m reporting on it” — this is by no means meant to replace actual monitoring systems (though it could easily be used to interface with them).

While I wrote fairly thorough pydoc, the overall documentation is hardly extensive, so I’d be happy to answer questions if getting at netbotz data from python is interesting to anybody else.