CIRCONUS the Blog Performance Monitoring - Revolutionized.

Setting up a monitoring system can be a lot of work, especially if you are a large corporation with hundreds or thousands of hosts. Regardless of the size of your business, it still takes time to figure out what you want to monitor, how you are going to get at the data, and then to start collecting, but in the end it is very rewarding to know you have insight.

When we launched Circonus, we had an API to do nearly everything that could be done via the web UI (within reason) and expected it to make it easy for people to program against and get their monitoring off the ground quickly. Quite a few customers did just that, but still wanted an easier way to get started.

Today we are releasing the first version of our templating API to help you get going (templating will also be available via the web UI in the near future). With this new API you can create a service template by choosing a host and a group of check bundles as "masters." Then you simply attach new hosts to the template, and the checks are created for you and deployed on the agents. Check out the documentation for full details.

Once a check is associated with a template, it cannot be changed on its own…you must alter the master check first and then re-sync the template. To re-sync, you just need to GET the current template definition and then POST it back; the system will take care of it from there.

To remove bundles or hosts, just remove them from the JSON payload before POSTing, and choose a removal method. Likewise, to add a host or bundle back to a template, just add it into the payload and then POST. We offer a few different removal and reactivation methods to make it easy to keep or remove your data and to start collecting it again. These methods are documented in the notes section of the documentation.

Future plans for templates include syncing rules across checks and adding templated graphs so that adding a new host will automatically add the appropriate metrics to a graph. Keep an eye on our change log for enhancements.

When we rolled out our initial API months ago, we took a first stab at getting the most useful features exposed to help customers get up to speed with the service. A handful of our users expressed displeasure with having to use their login credentials for basic access to the management API. Starting today, we're pleased to announce support for access tokens within the Circonus API.

Tokens offer fine-grained access for each user to a specific service account, at your permission role or lower. For example, if Bob is a normal user on the Acme Inc. account, he can create tokens allowing normal or read-only access. Multiple applications can use the same token, but each application has to be approved by Bob in the token management page, diabolically named My Tokens. To get started, browse over to this page inside your user profile, select your account from the drop-down and click the "plus tab" to create your first token.

The first time you try to connect with a new application using your token, the API service will hand back a HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required. When you visit the My Tokens page again you'll see a button to approve the new application-token request. Once this has been approved you'll be able to connect to the API with your new application-token.

Using the token is even easier. Just pass the token as X-Circonus-Auth-Token and your application name as X-Circonus-App-Name in your request headers. Here's a basic example using curl from the command-line:

$ curl -H "X-Circonus-Auth-Token: ec45e8a2-d6d9-624c-c21c-a83f573731c1" \
       -H "X-Circonus-App-Name: testapp" \
           https://circonus.com/api/json/list_accounts

[{
   "account":"social_networks",
   "account_description":"Monitoring for The Social Network.",
   "account_name":"Social Networks"
   "circonus_metric_limit":500,
   "circonus_metrics_used":124,
}]

One of the more convenient features with our tokens is how well they integrate with user roles. A token will never have higher access permissions than its owner. In fact, if you lower a user's role on your account, their tokens automatically reflect this as well. Changing a "normal" user to "read-only" will render their tokens the same access level. But if you restore their original role, the token will also have its original privileges restored. Secure and convenient.

If you have any questions about our new API tokens or would like to see more examples with the Circonus API, drop us a line at hello@circonus.com.

One of the big announcements for us at Velocity 2010 last week was the formal release of our Developer site and Management API. Designed as a RESTful service, the Circonus API was designed to allow users to programmatically adjust monitors and alerts as their architecture evolves. Currently it supports all basic functionality for managing Checks, Metrics, Contacts and Contact Groups, Rules and Metric Dependencies. Support for managing Graphs and Worksheets will be released in a future version.

But publishing a Web Services API is only the first part of the puzzle. You really have to cultivate the community using it, by demonstrating just how easy and powerful it really is. We're planning to publish tons of useful examples here and over at the Developer site in the days and weeks to come. You might even see examples in the form of Chef recipes or Puppet modules.

Coincidentally, the guys over at Opscode have been doing their part to help out too. Adam Jacob, the CTO of Opscode and creator of Chef, took it upon himself to extend our API and make it even easier for Ruby and Rails users. Check out his ruby-circonus project over at GitHub.

Needless to say, the disciplines of Agile Operations and Infrastructure as Code rely on the sort of programmatic elasticity that our new API makes possible. Deploying systems and services is just one small part of the solution; it's vital to track the performance of your IT systems and be able to correlate their effects on your Business systems. Automating your monitoring system to evolve in step with your architecture is a great way to avoid the human factor which will inevitably result in missing monitors and alerts.