Support for APC apcupsd daemon

[ArthurMitchell42]

Would supporting the apcupsd system directly as an alternative to NUT-tools be useful?
Looking at this there seem to be two options to support this, either logging in via telnet and issuing commands at the command line or using the NIS option on port 3551.
Looking in to this I suggest the NIS approach since:

• A log in via telnet seems to be mutually exclusive to using the web interface (tbc?)
• NIS Does not require a log in (tbc?)
• Not all UPS devices and installations might support telnet

[modem7]

NIS I think would still require login, but it certainly is the best option going forwards as that way we wouldn't have to have telnet within the image.

[ArthurMitchell42]

I have a beta test version with APC support available on DockerHub. This can be pulled as kronos443/nutcase:apcbeta
This is a first cut which I've only been able to test with a dummy copy of apcupsd on a VM. It's eary days on this and I can't vouch for stability but it seems to work on my test system. I'd be very grateful for help in testing this out.

Usage

When calling the JSON endpoint the parameter mode should be added, set to apc. When using the same container to scrape a NUT server you can omit mode=nut as that is the default (although this could be added for clarity).

http://[nutcase-ip]/json?mode=apc&target=[apcupsd-ip]

The format of the returned JSON is compatible with the NUT equivalent and parameters and names can be identified by calling the URL above to see the JSON in a browser.

In my basic test system with very little available data I've used the following lines in the HomePage services.yaml:

    - APC test:
        href: http://10.0.10.83:9995/log?lines=40
        description: APC Daemon Test
        icon: ups.png
        widget:
            type: customapi
            url: http://10.0.10.9:9995/json?mode=apc&target=10.0.10.225
            refreshInterval: 30000 # In milliseconds, set to ~60s
            method: GET
            mappings:
            - field: 
                smartups750:
                   STATUS
              label: Status
              format: text
            - field: 
                smartups750: 
                   UPSNAME
              label: Name
              format: text
            - field:
                smartups750: 
                   MINTIMEL
              label: Time
              format: text
            - field: 
                smartups750: 
                   MBATTCHG
              label: Min Chrg
              format: text

Where 10.0.10.9 is the docker host of NUTCase and 10.0.10.225 is the VM running apcupsd.
On the machine with apcuspd, in the file /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf the key settings before use are:

NETSERVER on
NISIP 0.0.0.0

You can verify that the port is open to remote machines by opening it with telnet from another machine.
telnet <acpuspd-ip> 3551

Limitations

• Only one UPS per APC server is currently supported
• When in NIS server mode my server occasionally fails to answer a query. I've put a single retry mechanism in place which seems to cover most instances but the figures may occasionally go blank if this doesn't fully address the issue.
• Obviously the data returned by APC is different in format to NUT. This means that only the json endpoint (not the metric end point) can be used at the moment.
• Variable transforms are not supported yet.
• Because of the transfer mechanism an APC server will take longer to load than a NUT server.

This configuration should give you:

[ArthurMitchell42]

The beta can be pulled from DockerHub

[ArthurMitchell42]

The Beta release for V0.2.0 is ready. This can be pulled from DockerHub as kronos443/nutcase:v0.2.0-beta3

New features

• Added support for APC servers running apcupsd daemon
• Added listing the APC log events with the end point /apclog
• Added support for variable reworking to make virtual variables with changed text or numeric values [1]
• Added support for a health check end point /health which returns JSON “OK”: ”True”
• Added a list of NUT client machines and a count number of same to the returned JSON under: [2]
  • \ clients \ list and
  • \ clients \ count

[1] This feature requires a new configuration file and the options available are documented here

[2] The new information, listing the clients of each UPS, is placed under the UPS section of the JSON as follows. You can also see some reworked variables added to the list just above them.

[ArthurMitchell42]

Version V0.3.0 Beta 1 is available now with improved support for APC.

An APC server can now have the current state visualised in the GUI and even more usefully, can translate the APC variables to NUT format on the go so that one instance of Prometheus can log a mix of NUT and APC devices to on Grafana dashboard using the metrics method.

[ArthurMitchell42]

Support for APU on the GUI and metric scraping is implemented