September Pack Updates: Usability

Time for our monthly roundup of new packs on the StackStorm Exchange. This time it’s a new pack for Extreme Networks devices, and usability improvements to the Email, Ansible, Sensu and Napalm packs.

New Pack: EXOS

StackStorm will soon become part of Extreme Networks. As just a little taste of what’s to come, we now have an EXOS pack for running commands on EXOS devices.

Expect to see tighter integration with Extreme Networks devices in future.

Usability Improvements

Here’s a few fixes and changes to make it easier to use some of the existing packs

• Email: Some elements of the configuration were really confusing. It didn’t really make sense to use accounts under “imap_mailboxes” for outbound email. We’ve overhauled the pack to make things clearer. NB: You must update your configuration to use the new pack. We’re sure the migration will be worth it.
• Ansible: Handling of JSON values in --extra-vars now works properly.
• Sensu: The core pack itself hasn’t changed, but now the Sensu handler code is distributed as a Sensu plugin. This means you can install it using sudo sensu-install -p stackstorm on your Sensu server. Much simpler, and easier to automate.
• Napalm: Improved exception handling, in particular better error messages for when you’ve forgotten to configure the pack, or load the configuration.

Thanks to all those that contributed with code and bug reports.

More Contributions Always Welcome

Got an idea for a new pack? Or maybe you’ve written an internal pack, and you’d love to see your name beside so many other cool people at the StackStorm Exchange? Open a Pull Request against the exchange-incubator repo, and we’ll help you through the rest.