NAME

       smokeping_extend - Notes on extending Smokeping

OVERVIEW

       This document is intended to guide prospective authors in writing new Smokeping probes.
       It mostly describes the interface between Smokeping and its probe modules. If it seems too
       complicated to understand, look at the existing modules for examples.

       Comments and proposed changes or additions are welcome.  Please send them to the
       smokeping-users mailing list. Patches against the POD source of this document are most
       appreciated.

CHOOSING A BASE CLASS

       The first thing you should decide is which base class you should use for your probe.  For
       most (if not all) uses it's a choice between Smokeping::probes::base and
       Smokeping::probes::basefork.  The former is intended for probes that can measure their
       targets all in one go, while the latter is for probing them one at a time, possibly in
       several concurrent subprocesses.

       At the moment, the only probes that use "Smokeping::probes::base" are the FPing
       derivatives. All the others use "Smokeping::probes::basefork", and chances are you should
       too. This document will thus concentrate on the latter case.

SKELETON FILE

       The Smokeping::probes::skel module is a non-functional probe that is intended to make a
       good basis for a new probe module. Copy the file, "lib/probes/skel.pm", to a new name and
       just fill out the blanks :) Note that the names of real probe modules must start with a
       capital letter.

PROBE DOCUMENTATION

       The probe documentation is generated from the source code with the smokeping arguments
       "--man" or "--makepod". The embedded POD documentation should point to this real
       documentation, so that curious users of the "perldoc" command see what's going on.  All
       the current probes do this.

       You should provide the method "pod_hash" that returns a reference to a hash with keys
       corresponding to the section names you want in the manpage. The supported section names
       are "name", "overview", "description", "authors", "notes", "bugs", and "see_also". If you
       don't need a particular section, just leave it out.

       The special sections "synopsis" and "variables" are automatically generated from the
       description of your variables. See below.

       Note that if you use 'here documents' ('<<') that have POD markup inside, you should
       escape the markup so that it doesn't show up in the embedded POD documentation. Most
       probes do it like this:

        my $e = "=";
        my $doc = <<DOC;
        ${e}head1 SECTION TITLE
        DOC

PROBE DESCRIPTION

       The probe should offer the "ProbeDesc" method that returns a short description of what it
       does. This will be used in the graphs produced by the web frontend.

VARIABLES

       All Smokeping probes must define their variables by implementing a "probevars" method for
       probe-specific variables and a "targetvars" method for target-specific variables. If you
       don't know the difference between these yet, see smokeping_examples.

       (The probes that are derived from "Smokeping::probes::base" don't support target-specific
       variables, so they only use the "probevars" method.)

       The base classes offer these methods too to provide the variables that are common to all
       the probes (eg. the probe-specific "step" variable and the target-specific "pings"
       variable. If you don't want to add anything to the base class variables (perhaps because
       all your variables are of a target-specific nature, so you don't need new probe-specific
       variables at all), you can leave the corresponding method out and it will be inherited
       from the base class.

       When you do supply your own "probevars" or "targetvars" method, you should combine your
       variables with those coming from the superclass. There is a convenience method called
       "_makevars" that does this, and the common idiom is

        sub probevars {
               my $class = shift;
               return $class->_makevars($class->SUPER::probevars, {
                       # your variables go here
               }
        }

       The variables are declared in a syntax that comes from the module used for parsing the
       configuration file, "Config::Grammar". Each variable should be a hash that uses the
       "special variable keys" documented in Config::Grammar. See "Smokeping::probes::skel" and
       the other probes for examples.

       For reference, here are the keys the hash should have. Much of this is taken straight from
       the "Config::Grammar" manual.

       Keys you must provide
           _doc
               Description of the variable.

           _example
               An example value. This will be used in the SYNOPSIS section in the probe manual.

       Optional keys
           _default
               A default value that will be assigned to the variable if none is specified or
               inherited.

           _re Regular expression upon which the value will be checked.

           _re_error
               String containing the returned error in case the regular expression doesn't match
               (if not specified, a generic 'syntax error' message will be returned).

           _sub
               A function pointer. It is called for every value, with the value passed as its
               first argument. If the function returns a defined value it is assumed that the
               test was not successful and an error is generated with the returned string as
               content.

       The "probevars" and "targetvars" methods should return hash references that contain the
       variable names as keys and the hashes described above as values. In addition the
       "Config::Grammar" special section key "_mandatory" is supported and should contain a
       reference to a list of mandatory variables. The "_makevars" method is aware of this
       special key and merges the mandatory lists in its arguments. Note that no other
       "Config::Grammar" special section keys are supported.

INITIALIZATION

       If you must do something at probe initialization time, like check that the external
       program you're going to use behaves as you expect, you should do it in the "new" method.
       You should probably also take care that you don't run the tests needlessly while in CGI
       mode. The usual way to do this is to test for $ENV{SERVER_SOFTWARE}. See the
       "Smokeping::probes::skel" module for an example.

PINGING

       All the real action happens in the "pingone" method (or, for
       "Smokeping::probes::base"-derived probes, in the "ping" method.) The arguments for
       "pingone" are $self, the module instance (since this is a method) and $target, the target
       to be probed.

       You can access the probe-specific variables here via the "$self->{properties}" hash and
       the target-specific ones via the "$target->{vars}" hash. You get the number of pings
       needed for the target via the "pings" method: "my $count = $self->pings($target)".

       You should return a sorted array of the latency times measured. If a ping fails, don't put
       anything in the array.

       That's it, you're done!

EXAMPLE CONFIGURATIONS

       If you would like to provide a documented example configuration for your probe (in
       addition to the automatically generated SYNOPSIS section in the probe manual), you can do
       so by adding it to the Smokeping::Examples module.  Look for the 'examples' subroutine and
       add your example there.

       Future versions of Smokeping might provide a way to embed examples in the probe modules
       too. The author's motivation for implementing this would be greatly increased by even a
       single demand for it, so please speak up if you think you'd use it.

TIMEOUT HANDLING

       If you deal with timeouts (for example because your program offers a parameter for
       specifying the timeout for the pings), you should know a few things.

       First, there's timeout logic in "Smokeping::probes::basefork" that kills the probe when
       the timeout is reached. By default the timeout is (# of pings * 5 seconds) + 1 second. If
       you expect that your pings can take longer, you should modify the default value of the
       probe-specific variable "timeout".  This would be done like this:

        sub probevars {
               my $class = shift;
               my $h = $class->SUPER::probevars;
               $h->{timeout}{_default} = 10; # override the superclass default
               return $class->_makevars($h, {
                       # your variables go here
               }
        }

       If you want to provide a target-specific "timeout" setting, you should delete the probe-
       specific variable and be sure to provide a default for your target-specific one. See eg.
       "Smokeping::probes::AnotherDNS" for an example of how this is done.

       Providing a target-specific "timeout" will make the timeout in
       "Smokeping::probes::basefork" be (# of pings * the maximum timeout of all targets) + 1
       second. The 1 second is added so that the own timeout logic of the probe has time to kick
       in even in the worst case (ie. all pings are lost) before "Smokeping::probes::basefork"
       starts killing the processes.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2005 by Niko Tyni.

LICENSE

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
       the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
       version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
       without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
       See the GNU General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program;
       if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139,
       USA.

AUTHOR

       Niko Tyni <ntyni@iki.fi>

BUGS

       This document makes writing new probes look much harder than it really is.

SEE ALSO

       The other Smokeping documents, especially smokeping_config.