Synse Server provides a JSON API for monitoring and control of data center and IT equipment, including reading sensors and server power control - via. numerous backend protocols such as IPMI, Redfish, SNMP, I2C, RS485, and PLC. The API is easy to integrate into third-party monitoring, management and orchestration providers. It provides a simple, curl-able interface for common and custom devops tasks.

The CLI makes it even easier to see what's going on with your physical hardware. You can use it to do any kind of scripting required for your use cases.

The Synse Server API can be consumed via GraphQL with synse-graphql.

If you're looking for an integration, check out synse-prometheus. You'll be able to put together complete monitoring and dashboard solution from the instructions there.

Additional documentation may be found on the Docs site.

There are a variety of options on how Synse Server can be run:

• on Ubuntu 16.06
• on CentOS 7
• via Docker

1. Get the software.

   curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/VaporIO/synse/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
   sudo apt-get install synse-server
   

   Note that if you'd like more detailed instructions, you can see package cloud.

2. Edit the configuration file. Note, if you'd like to kick the tires and don't have hardware sitting around, it is possible to run an emulator that mocks out the data.

   vi /etc/synse-server/config.json
   

3. Startup the server.

   sudo systemctl start synse-server
   

4. Verify that everything is up and running by issuing a 'scan' command. The response should be all your configured servers.

   curl http://localhost:5000/synse/1.4/scan
   

1. Get the software.

   curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/VaporIO/synse/script.rpm.sh | sudo bash
   sudo yum install synse-server
   

   Note that if you'd like more detailed instructions, you can see package cloud

2. Edit the configuration file. Note, if you'd like to kick the tires and don't have hardware sitting around, it is possible to run an emulator that mocks out the data.

   vi /etc/synse-server/config.json
   

3. Startup the server.

   sudo systemctl start synse-server
   

4. Verify that everything's up and running by issuing a 'scan' command. The response should be all your configured servers.

   curl http://localhost:5000/synse/1.4/scan
   

1. Create a configuration file. There are multiple examples in the repo under the configs/synse directory. The documentation has more details on what can be configured. Note, if you'd like to kick the tires and don't have hardware sitting around, it is possible to run an emulator that mocks out the data.

2. Run the container

   docker run -p 5000:5000 -v config.json:/synse/config.json vaporio/synse-server
   

3. Verify that everything's up and running by issuing a 'scan' command. The response should be all your configured servers.

   curl http://localhost:5000/synse/1.4/scan
   

To build a custom distribution of Synse (for example, to include site-specific TLS certificates, or to configure Nginx to use site-specific authn/authz), the included Makefile can be used to package up the distribution.

In the simplest case, from the Synse directory:

make build

To use Synse with data available, you can run it with an emulator for a given protocol. LAN-based protocols (IPMI, Redfish, and SNMP) use an external Docker container to run the emulator, while serial-based protocols (PLC, I2C, RS485) each have an emulator that can run in parallel with Synse inside the Synse container. See the full documentation for more.

Starting with a PLC emulator can be done simply with:

docker run \
    -p 5000:5000 \
    -v `pwd`/sample/config_plc.json:/synse/override/config.json \
    vaporio/synse-server emulate-plc

For a full accounting of Synse's supported sub-commands, run Synse with the help flag:

docker run vaporio/synse-server --help

The tests for Synse exist in the synse/tests directory. The Synse documentation goes into more detail on the test setup.

All tests are containerized for consistency and ease of deployment and integration. There are many test cases, so running the full suite of tests may take some time.

Logs for Nginx, uWSGI, and the Synse Flask application are routed to stdout/stderr of the container, so they are all viewable via docker logs. Logs for a given component are prefaced with the name of that component, e.g. for Nginx, nginx | - this makes it easier to see the logs for the components individually. Where docker logs synse (assuming the container is named synse) would get logs for everything,

• docker logs synse | grep "synse |" would give logs for the Synse Flask application
• docker logs synse | grep "nginx |" would give logs for Nginx
• docker logs synse | grep "uwsgi |" would give logs for uWSGI

Synse is released under GPLv2 - see LICENSE for more information.

• Workaround is docker login, even if logged in already.