Using NodePing’s API with Python

Over the years, NodePing has offered an API to manage most aspects of your monitoring. Today, we are introducing our new Python 2/3 library to interface with this API. Instead of reinventing the wheel in your code to interact with our API, drop this library into your project and with a few lines you can easily manage your checks and various other aspects of your account. With the Python library at your disposal, you can:

• List, create, update, and delete checks
• Manage contacts
• Manage contact groups
• Manage schedules
• Get check results and uptime
• Get notification information
• Get probe information

This means that the Python library has feature parity with our API. You can get the code from our GitHub repository or install it from Pypi via pip. There is also some documentation written to help you by providing snippets of what your code might look like when querying the API with Python.

In this post, we will share a brief introduction to getting started with using the Python library and how it can be used to manage your account. You can use your installer of choice, but in this introduction I will use pip to install the library:

pip install nodeping-api

You may have to specify Python2 or 3 for your pip version, depending on your system. To start using the library, you will need to provide your API token as a variable, and an optional subaccount ID to start managing your checks.

From here, you can do things such as list failing checks:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

""" Demo for Python library
"""

from pprint import pprint
from nodeping_api import get_checks

def main():
    """ Main function
    """

    token = 'my-secret-token'

    query = get_checks.GetChecks(token)
    checks = query.failing_checks()

    pprint(checks)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

This example will collect all your failing checks and return them to be used in a dictionary format. The output might look something like this:

{'2019052211307H0IX-KCGJCX1X': {'_id': '2019052211307H0IX-KCGJCX1X',
    'created': 1563471438952,
    'customer_id': '2019052211307H0IX',
    'dep': False,
    'enable': 'active',
    'firstdown': 1563471472497,
    'homeloc': False,
    'interval': 3,
    'label': 'Test Check',
    'modified': 1563471438952,
    'notifications': [],
    'parameters': {'follow': False,
        'ipv6': False,
        'sens': 2,
        'target': 'https://notreal.nodeping.com/',
        'threshold': 5},
    'public': False,
    'queue': 'utcoCpoUJx',
    'runlocations': False,
    'state': 0,
    'status': 'assigned',
    'type': 'HTTP',
    'uuid': 've8s9sgj-j588-4li3-9ytp-1kho9wtutriy'}}

You can also create checks. For example, here is a basic idea of creating an HTTP check:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

""" Demo for Python library
"""

from pprint import pprint
from nodeping_api import create_check

def main():
    """ Main function
    """

    token = 'my-secret-token'

    target = 'https://nodeping.com'
    enabled = True
    public = False
    interval = 1
    runlocations = 'nam'

    created = create_check.http_check(
        token,
        target,
        label="Check NodePing",
        enabled=enabled,
        public=public,
        interval=interval,
        runlocations=runlocations
    )

    pprint(created)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Along with the output when the check is created. Note that it is in a dictionary format, but pretty printed so it’s easier to read here:

{'_id': '2019052211307H0IX-WEOR7GAH',
 'change': 1563474539024,
 'created': 1563474539024,
 'customer_id': '2019052211307H0IX',
 'dep': False,
 'enable': 'active',
 'homeloc': False,
 'interval': 1,
 'label': 'Check NodePing',
 'modified': 1563474539024,
 'parameters': {'follow': False,
                'ipv6': False,
                'sens': 2,
                'target': 'https://nodeping.com/',
                'threshold': 5},
 'runlocations': ['nam'],
 'public': False,
 'status': 'modified',
 'type': 'HTTP',
 'uuid': '1fog8q51-zdhv-4vmb-832r-tsun0o9unt3f'}

You can also get your uptime from a certain time interval. In this example, you can find what your uptime is since July, 2019

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from nodeping_api import results
from pprint import pprint


def main():
    """
    """

    token = 'my-secret-token'
    check_id = 'my-check-id'

    # Get uptime since July, 2019
    uptime_results = results.get_uptime(token, check_id, start="2019-07")

    pprint(uptime_results)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

This will give you an output that looks something like this:
{'2019-07': {'down': 2154131, 'enabled': 2678400000, 'uptime': 99.92},
'2019-08': {'down': 88733, 'enabled': 753256766, 'uptime': 99.988},
'total': {'down': 2242864, 'enabled': 3431656766, 'uptime': 99.935}}

This is only a snippet of what the library can do, and the documentation is detailed to get you started on your journey. Give it a try and see how you can improve your uptime monitoring in your Python projects. This code is free and available to download. We encourage pull requests for new features so if you make changes or have requests, feel free to share.

If you aren’t using NodePing yet, you can sign up for a free, 15-day trial and test out monitoring your services today and take advantage of our API in your own Python projects.