Following up from the blog post here, here's a step by step what I did to get things to work:

  1. Went to github, downloaded https://github.com/circonus-labs/python-circonusapi and https://github.com/circonus-labs/circonusvi.
  2. Created my .circonusapirc file in ~/ , substituting my account_name for "foo" and the API key I created at https://login.circonus.com/user/tokens.
  3. cd'ed to the python-circonusapi-master directory and ran "sudo ./setup.py install".
  4. cd'ed to the circonusvi-master.
  5. Ran ./circonusvi.py and got a nasty error ending with "TokenNotValidated".
  6. Went back to https://login.circonus.com/user/tokens, refreshed the page, and clicked on "Allow Access"
  7. Re-ran ./circonusvi.py. And whammo - it works! Got the full list of stuff from my account.

Note you can use different editors - very cool - with the -E option (nano or emacs editors are options). You can play around with the -e option to filter on specific things your interested in, and the other options.

The line of code that does the matching: https://github.com/circonus-labs/circonusvi/blob/master/circonusvi.py#L1931, which does a regular expression match. The engine is python regular expressions, and documentation on how it works is available at http://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html#regular-expression-syntax and http://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html#re.RegexObject.search.

Let me know if you have any questions -christian.madsen@circonus.com.