As a software dev who worked with an ISP, I learnt monitoring is a big thing. Customers have availability metrics we need to meet, and more importantly customers are paying for a service. When it goes down, they shouldnt have to be the ones to call it up to let you know, and they should also find out about an outage as early as possible. Well before their bosses come knocking on their door. And regardless of size, monitoring is still a big deal for any sized company and support team, and glad to say of interest at the company I work for now.
In the last 12 months I’ve been getting to know the Hyperic Monitoring Platform. It has an open source community edition with an automatic free barrier to let small teams monitor what is important. Additionally it is easily configurable via a web UI, which allows non-technical staff to add monitoring, setup alerts and that sort of thing. Most importantly it is configurable via an api (or two). There is the HQ API which is a REST api, and the Groovy API.
I haven’t need to venture into the API at all to date but did recently get asked the question if HQ was able to export views and reports. The good news after watching this vid is that you can.
The interview with Jon Travis reveals that the API is not only capable of exporting its information, but it also allows developers to add screens into their HQ installs.