Simple remote process monitoring with Python

Question

I'd like to write a python script to perform some very simple "agentless" monitoring of remote processes running on linux servers.

It would perform the following tasks, in psuedocode:

for each remoteIPAddress in listOfIPAddresses:
    log into server@remoteIPAddress via ssh
    execute the equivalent of a 'ps -ef' command
    grep the result to make sure a particular process (by name) is still running

One way to do this is to have python call shell scripts in a subprocess and parse their output. That seems pretty inefficient. Is there a better way to do this via python libraries?

All I could find via research here and elsewhere was:

• psutil - looks like it doesn't do remote monitoring, so I'd have to run agents on the remote machines to report stats back via RPC.
• pymeter - I would have to write my own plugin for monitoring a specific remote service.
• stackoverflow #4546492 - Some helpful links but the poster was looking for a different solution.

Thanks, and please go easy on me, it's my first question :-)

Answer 1

The Fabric library may be of interest to you.

Answer 2

Check out paramiko. You can use it to ssh into the server and run commands. You can then parse the results and do what you'd like with them.

Answer 3

Taking cues from the answers above, I investigated Fabric and found the following presentation particularly interesting/helpful. It is an overview of three libraries -- Fabric, Cuisine, and Watchdog -- for server monitoring and administration. For posterity:

Using Fabric, Cuisine, and Watchdog for server administration in Python