Scout Client 2.0 is on the Horizon

May 09, 2008 by Charles

Posted in Features | 1 comment

We’ve been working on two major features that we’re sure will be a hit, and that we can’t wait to talk about:

1) Easier Plugin Creation—there’s a reason we love Ruby, and not just because it’s such a powerful language for talking to external system processes and manipulating strings (as pointed out by JEG2 in our RubyInside debut). Ruby makes writing powerful code down-right simple through a very natural language. And with our new plugin code helpers and syntax, you can write a plugin like this:

my_output = `run some wild script here`
remember(:last_time_output => my_output)
report(:data => my_output)
if my_output ~= /Error/
  alert("An Error Occurred", "Details: #{my_output}")
end

And that’s not all. We’ve built a clearer syntax for how you invoke Scout, and how you interact with options and how you can store your own settings and report your own data.

2) Automatic Client Provisioning—if you have any servers in the cloud, or just more than one server, you already know how easy it is to install Scout (one liner to install and another to setup), but it just got easier than that. You can now automatically provision clients using the scout client itself. I know, crazy-talk, but watch. On bootup, of our Amazon EC2 instance, we’ll just run:

scout clone [client-key] `hostname` >> /etc/crontab

And we’ve just setup a new client on scout, with all our pre-configured plugins, cloned from another client, and the name of our hostname, setup to run on our interval.

If you’re interested in helping us beta test the new 2.0 version of our client, you can install it from our beta-gems server:

sudo gem install scout --source http://beta-gems.scoutapp.com/

Let us know what you think. Be sure to check the README to find out more details on what’s new.