<p>It would be very unusual for a web product to not have an API these days, and designing and implementing the APIs first and foremost is considered the right way to do things by many. <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/monitoring/" title="Rackspace cloud monitoring" target="_blank">Rackspace cloud monitoring</a> seems to have embraced this philosophy fully. In fact, it does not even have a graphical user interface (at least not at the moment). Instead, it has a well designed JSON/HTTP API and a (somewhat complex ) data model. It seems odd at first, but most welcome if you work on integration and automation as I do. After all the service is built for developers. In addition to the JSON/HTTP API, Rackspace provides a command line interface called <a href="https://github.com/racker/rackspace-monitoring-cli" target="_blank">raxmon</a>, similar to OpsGenie <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/574596-lamp-command-line-interface-for-opsgenie" target="_blank">lamp</a>) to interact with the API easily. Given that <a href="http://www.opsgenie.com" target="_blank">OpsGenie</a> also has an HTTP/JSON <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/565567-web-api" target="_blank">API</a> (as do number of services we use) one can not only automate the entire process of configuring Rackspace to monitor their services from multiple locations (monitoring zones) but also forwarding alerts to OpsGenie to notify the users. Rackspace API currently support notifications via email and webhook. Although either one can be used to forward Rackspace alerts to OpsGenie, webhook is the preferred mechanism as it would not rely on another component in the middle. OpsGenie Rackspace integration enables Rackspace cloud monitoring users to forward alerts from Rackspace to OpsGenie using webhooks. <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/793489-rackspace-cloud-monitoring-integration" target="_blank">OpsGenie Rackspace Integration guide</a> describes how to configure Rackspace and OpsGenie. The integration enables users to receive and view Rackspace alerts on their mobile phones using OpsGenie apps. And using OpsGenie custom actions, users can even initiate corrective actions, reboot servers, start new instances, etc. Rackspace cloud monitoring does not yet provide historical data and graphing but once these capabilities are added, you can expect that it will be possible to attach the data or the graphs related to the alarms to the alert as well. Happy monitoring!</p>![]()
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