Overview

The Python Event Monitor is one of FrameFlow's scripting event monitors that lets you integrate custom monitoring actions into our monitoring, scheduling and alerting engine. Scripts can be as simple or complex as you choose. They tell FrameFlow what status and event text to generate and can also generate graph data points which will populate graphs throughout the FrameFlow interface.

Before using this event monitor, you must install Python for Windows version 3.7 or later on your monitoring server and remote nodes. To test that Python is installed correctly, open a command line window, run "python", and verify that the hPython version is displayed.

Use Cases

• Writing scripts to perform custom monitoring actions

Monitoring Options

Script

Paste your script into the text box in the event monitor settings. The script will run on the FrameFlow system, so if it needs to reach out to a network device, it needs to implement that ability.

Tokens

Three tokens are available to your script. They will be replaced at run time with values from FrameFlow's monitoring engine.

The available tokens are:

• %%devicename%% - Replaced with the device name of the device to be monitored.
• %%displayname%% - Replaced with the display name of the device to be monitored.
• %%devicegroup%% - Replaced with the group name that the device resides in.

Output Requirements

The event monitor decides what actions to take based on the output of your script. The standard output format is as follows:

If your script outputs the above text, the event monitor will recognize that the script check succeeded while checking the device 'devicename'. It will generate an event history record with the text "Custom message".

Here is a more concrete example:

Multi-Line Output

You may want to provide robust output from your script including multiple lines of text. Your script output must all be on one line but you can use tokens to tell the event monitor to generate multiple lines in the event text.

For example:

Statuses

Your script can generate success, warning, error and critical events. See the following examples of the output for each:

• Success(hostname)=All checks completed successfully.
• Info(hostname)=You might want to look at this.
• Warning(hostname)=Something went a little bit wrong.
• Error(hostname)=Something went very wrong.
• Critical(hostname)=OMG, the server is on fire.

Authentication and Security

Your script will run on the FrameFlow main console (or on the remote node in a multi-site configuration). If the script accesses other network devices, it will require credentials with sufficient rights to perform its task.

Data Points

The data points generated by any scripting event monitor depend on the custom monitoring action it performs.

Sample Output

Tutorial

To view the tutorial for this event monitor, click here.