It’s obvious I’ve caught the automation bug. Beyond just automating the network I’ve finally started to dip my toes in the home automation pool as well.

The latest addition to the home project was the Philipps hue light bulbs. Basically, I just wanted a new toy, but imagine my delight when I found that there’s a full REST API available. 

I’ve got a REST API and a light bulb and suddenly I was inspired!

The Project

Network Management Systems have long suffered from information overload.

Notifications have to be tuned and if you’re really good you can eventually get the stream down to a dull roar. Unfortunately, the notification process is still broken in that the notifications are generally dumped into your email which if you are anything like me…

Yes. That’s really my number as of this writing

One of the ways of dealing with the deluge is to use a different medium to deliver the message. Many NMS systems, including HPE IMC, has the capability of issuing audio alarms, but let’s be honest. That can get pretty annoying as well and it’s pretty easy to mute them.

I decided that I would use the REST interfaces of the HPE IMC NMS and the Phillips Hue lightbulbs to provide a visual indication of the general state of the system.Yes, there’s a valid business justifiable reason for doing this. But c’mon, we’re friends?  The real reason I worked on this was because they both have REST APIs and I was bored. So why not, right?

The other great thing about this is that you don’t need to spend your day looking at a NOC screen. You can login when the light goes to whatever color you decide is bad.

Getting Started with Philipps Hue API

The Philipps SDK getting started was actually really easy to work through. As well, there’s an embedded HTML interface that allows you to play around with the REST API directly on the hue bridge.

Once you’ve setup your initial authentication to the bridge ( see the getting started guide ) you can login to the bridge at http://ip_address/debug/clip.html

From there it’s all fun and games. For instance, if you wanted to see the state of light number 14, you would navigate to api/%app_name%/lights/14 and you would get back the following in nice easy to read JSON.

http://ipaddress/debug/clip.html/

From here, it would be fairly easy to use a http library like REQUESTS to start issuing HTTP commands at the bridge but, as I’m sure you’re aware by now, there’s very little unread territory in the land of python.

PHUE library

Of course someone has been here before me and has written a nice library that works with both python 2 and python 3.  You can see the library source code here, or you can simple

>>> pip install phue

From your terminal.

The Proof of Concept

You can check out the code for the proof of concept here. Or you can watch the video below.

Breaking down the code

1) Grab Current Alarm List

2) Iterate over the Alarms and find the one with the most severe alarm state

3) Create a function to correlate the alarm state to the color of the Philipps Hue lightbulb.

4) Wait for things to move away from green.

Lessons Learned

The biggest lesson here was that colours on a screen and colours on a light bulb don’t translate very well. The green and the yellow lights weren’t far enough apart to be useful as a visual indicator of the health of the network, at least not IMHO.

The other thing I learned is that you can waste a lot of time working on aesthetics. Because I was leveraging the PHUE library and the PYHPEIMC library, 99% of the code was already written. The project probably took me less than 10 minutes to get the logic together and more than a few hours playing around with different colour combinations to get something that I was at least somewhat ok with. I imagine the setting and the ambient light would very much effect whether or not this looks good in your place of business.If you use my code, you’ll want to tinker with it.

Where to Next

We see IoT devices all over in our personal lives, but it’s interesting to me that I could set up a visual indicator for a NOC environment on network health state for less than 100$.  Just thinking about some of the possibilities here

• Connect each NOC agents ticket queue with the light color. Once they are assigned a ticket, they go orange for DO-NOT-DISTURB
• Connect the APP to a Clearpass authentication API and Flash the bulbs blue when the boss walks in the building. Always good to know when you should be shutting down solitaire and look like you’re doing something useful, right?
• Connect the APP to a Meridian location API and turn all the lights green when the boss walks on the floor.

Now I’m not advocating you should hide things from your boss, but imagine how much faster network outages would get fixed if we didn’t have to stop fixing them to explain to our boss what was happening and what we were going to be doing to fix them, right?

Hopefully, this will have inspired someone to take the leap and try something out,

Comments, questions?

@netmanchris