Wanted: API Pollers — Claim Your Bounty

Together We’ve Tamed Monitoring

Creating monitoring templates in Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is quick and easy and extends the monitoring capabilities above and beyond the templates that ship within the product. Combining the simplicity of creating custom monitoring templates and the passion of THWACKsters around the world has resulted in over 1,200 templates available to SAM users. One might say together we tamed the wild west of IT infrastructure and application monitoring.

But there’s a new breed of application in town, and it requires a new approach. To handle these pesky monitoring troubles, we’ve brought in a new sheriff to help the community. This sheriff goes by the name of API Poller, and where his predecessors leveraged SNMP, WMI, and scripting, he does for his job via RESTful APIs.

10 Best API Pollers Claim a Bounty

Call for Volunteer Deputies: The New Sheriff Needs Your Help!

The Sheriff can’t do this alone; he’s already provided close to 40 out-of-the-box SAM API poller templates, but that won’t cut it as we face the new IT frontier’s challenges. He’s made the decision to deputize all current THWACKsters for the month of April. The call is out asking for your help to make monitoring safe for all, regardless of your IT stack or where it’s deployed. Will you answer the call?

With a new frontier comes a new approach to monitoring. The SAM API poller can be used to monitor metrics via REST APIs, providing an easier way to collect data from modern application stacks, unique hardware, IoT devices, and other entities using the API calls to pass information. Define your API endpoints, provide credentials, pick the metrics you want to monitor, and let SAM monitor without the need for custom scripts. Create alerts for numeric and string monitoring. Additionally, the SAM API poller also allows you to chain multiple requests within a single poller. To simplify our API pollers’ management, a management page is provided to create, modify, and deploy API pollers in bulk across your environment.

Wanted: SAM API Pollers—Claim Your Bounty

The Sheriff and his duly appointed deputies have instituted a bounty program for one month to get you to submit your API pollers to the THWACK community. Submit your API Poller and claim your bounty. That way we can all sleep better at night knowing both our legacy and newer, modern applications are healthy and performant.

The Sheriff’s deputies will review the submitted API pollers, and they’ll pick up to 10 of them to become included in an upcoming SAM release. The authors of those 10 will each get 4,000 THWACK points for their contribution. Additionally, there's a special accommodation for their contributions to keep our community safe from monitoring blind spots.

API Poller Bounty Contest Details

  • All pollers must be submitted between April 1 and April 30, 2021
  • There is no limit to how many pollers a THWACKster may submit
  • Up to 10 submissions will end up in SAM as part of an upcoming release
    • If chosen, authors will be awarded 4,000 additional THWACK points
  • Prizes go to the top three submissions, chosen by the Sheriff’s deputies

Participating is easy. All you need to do is build, test, and then export an API Poller. See Terms and Conditions for official rules.

  1. Add an API Poller to your environment, pointing it at a part of your infrastructure
  2. Test the API Poller and (optionally) capture a screenshot or two to help describe its function
  3. Export your custom API Poller

Now that you’ve created your API poller, follow these simple steps to publish on THWACK, so we can corral all of the bounty submissions.

  1. Go to the API Poller gallery in the SAM Content Exchange.
  2. Click the big green CREATE button.
  3. Click Upload File and browse for your exported API Poller.
  4. Provide a good name and description (include those screenshots from earlier to help give guidance).  Include any additional details that would help other THWACKsters use your API Poller.
  5. When it's ready, click POST.

Now your API Poller is available for all members of the THWACK community! (Here’s an example showing those details: Folding@Home Ranking.)

A strong community is vital for people to connect, learn, and thrive, which is no different for the SolarWinds THWACK community. In advance, we thank you for being a member of our community and participating in our bounty program. We plan to have all the Sheriff’s deputies get together and decide on our bounty winners within a couple of weeks after the program submission deadline of April 30, 2021.

Contest Terms & Conditions: CA, UK, US | DE

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