Add an HTTP/Socket interface to communicate with NINA

[Stanley Dimant]

An interface that could be connected to to read out various information from NINA about the current imaging status, equipment status and so on to write your own applications against NINA.

I have a small mini PC where I RDP into which utilizes a small display. I would like to display information about the current status, current image and so on on the small display, for which I would design and write my own application. This application could be folded into NINA at some point as well, should there be an interest in this.

[Stanley Dimant]

Similar to Issue 6

[japz]

I think this is something I might be able to contribute to. I’m looking for a way to get started and learn C#. I was thinking we might add instrumentation, and the metrics could be made available through the Prometheus format. That should make it easy for people to make their own dashboard with Prometheus and Grafana and wouldn’t require that much extra code on the NINA side since we could use this library.

[Maple Gao]

That’s cool idea about Prometheus and Grafana idea. I’m currently using it with my local weather data.

[Naveen Malik]

I’ve written a metric exporter in python that scrapes nina debug logs and exports metrics for prometheus. This is used then to setup alerts and dashboards so I can sleep. I found this issue when looking if anybody had thought about integrating this into NINA directly. I don’t think this is something that fits as a plugin, instrumentation would be needed on core components I assume. I am not a C# developer and not sure I want to take it on.

The metric exporter I have is generic, also can export autofocus and phd2 metrics at this time. https://github.com/jewzaam/log-exporter
Metrics to prometheus and configuring alertmanager to route alerts to somewhere else (I am using a free PagerDuty account) is the key thing I value, but visualization is nice too. Example dashboard, what I’m glancing at periodically right now: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5fat9zzwcfcb8yy/2021-11-23-Grafana.JPG?dl=0

[Mirko]

This is very interesting. I saw this post now. First I generated a request by referring to me a bit to ekos. Look here.

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[Stefan B]

This is possible with the plugin framework - e.g. web session history viewer is already doing that