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Synse Platform

Synse is a simple, scalable platform which enables detailed monitoring and control of physical and virtual devices. These devices could be data center equipment, IoT devices, building management systems, or hardware on the edge. The platform is designed to support remote lights-out management and automation.

There are two core components to the Synse platform, the API server and device plugins.

What Synse Provides:

  • A uniform HTTP API to interface with devices across any protocol
  • The ability to read from and write to devices
  • Deterministic IDs for devices configured in a Synse deployment

What Synse Does Not Provide:

  • Persistence of device readings / write actions
  • Access control to plugins/devices
  • Analytics, inference, or general processing of device data

Components

Plugins

Plugins are the direct interface to devices, exposing them to the rest of the platform.

Briefly, a plugin is generally associated with a communication protocol, such as IPMI, SNMP, HTTP, I²C, etc. If the plugin is generalized, it should only be a matter of configuring it correctly to get readings for your devices (e.g., specifying the correct I²C registers).

Plugins may also be target-specific. For example, it may not be suitable to use a generalized HTTP plugin to access a custom REST API, so you may create a plugin that is specific to that API. Doing so would reduce the configuration burden, as many API-specific details could be codified into the custom plugin itself.

Regardless of how simple, complex, general, or specific, the job of a plugin is to communicate with a device, enabling the collection of any data it provides, such as temperature, humidity, power consumption, LED status, lock state, etc. Additionally, if a device can be written to, plugins provide a means to issue write requests to those devices. This can range from simply blinking an LED indicator, to remotely managing a building's HVAC system.

Server

The server ("Synse Server") provides a simple HTTP and WebSocket API which makes it easy to interact with the devices exposed by plugins. It routes incoming requests to the appropriate plugin for the specified device, so the user does not need to worry about where the device is or what protocol it speaks. The API provides uniform access over HTTP (or WebSocket), meaning that you can interact with a temperature sensor over RS-485 the same way you would a BMC over IPMI -- and you could do it all with curl.

The Synse Ecosystem

While the server and plugins are the two primary components, there are a number of projects which make up the Synse ecosystem: