h1. zenoss_client: A Ruby library for JSON/REST access to Zenoss

This is a work-in-progress to create an easy to use client JSON/REST API for
Zenoss (http://www.zenoss.com) written in Ruby.  I love Zenoss as a product,
but I am much more efficient in Ruby than Python so I decided to start
hacking this library together.  It is very incomplete and I am just adding
functionality as I need it or it is requested.

Cheers,

Dan Wanek

h2. CHANGES SINCE THE 0.1.x BRANCH

Starting with 0.5.0 I am trying to incorporate as much of the new JSON API
into this library as possible because the type conversion hackery that was
present in the REST code is largely unnecessary. Please note that the
initialization is much different because we are using the sign-in form auth
instead of the Basic auth of the previous version. This is because the JSON
calls do not support Basic authentication.

There is still much work that needs to be done in order to fully implement
all of the JSON methods. For now many of the older features fall back to
REST and some of those will always rely on REST because they are not
currently supported in the JSON API.


h2. REQUIREMENTS:
Gems:

* tzinfo: For Python DateTime to Ruby DateTime conversion


h2. UNSUPPORTED REST METHODS:
Some methods within Zope are unsupported due to type conversion issues.
I have created a work-around but you must add a custom Python script
to Zope in order to do this.  Please see this blog post for information
on how add the custom script:

http://distributed-frostbite.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-ruby-with-zenoss-part-1.html

UPDATE: The script itself is now part of the source tree and can be found here: tools/callZenossMethod.py
It should still be installed in the same fashion as the blog post steps through.

== TO USE:
A gem is now available.  'gem install zenoss_client'

<pre>
<code>
  require 'zenoss'
  require 'date'

  server = 'https://zenhost:port/zport/dmd'
  user, pass = 'zuser', 'zpass'
  @zen = Zenoss.connect server, user, pass
  dev = (@zen.find_devices_by_name 'myservername').first

  # Get RRD data for this device
  rrdpts = dev.get_rrd_data_points
  datapoints = dev.fetch_rrd_value rrdpts.first.name, (DateTime.now - 1)

  # Get the uptime of the device
  dev.sys_uptime

  # Get a list of events for this system
  dev.get_events
</code>
</pre>

Have fun and let me know what needs to be fixed / added.

== Testing
You can invoke a series of minitest based spec test using the supplied
tests and rake task. Simply run the following to kick off the tests
@bundle exec rake test@

You should see output similar to the following (The number of tests will
of course grow over time):
@3 tests, 6 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips@

If you get any failures, you should of course address them

Since the test suite requires a working Zenoss installation to test against,
some docker files are provided under test/docker. From a docker host, clone this
repo, cd to the appropriate test/docker/ subdirectory, and run @sh start.sh@ to
build and start the container. Once the container is running, you should be able
to run the tests as described above.