Administration Guide
Use TALES syntax to retrieve values and call methods on Zenoss objects. Several fields in Zenoss accept TALES syntax; these include:
Command templates
User commands
Event commands
zLinks
Commands (those associated with devices and those associated with events) can use TALES expressions to incorporate data from the related devices or events. TALES is a syntax for specifying expressions that let you access the attributes of certain objects, such as a device or an event in Zenoss.
For additional documentation on TALES syntax, see the TALES section of the Zope Page Templates Reference:
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/AppendixC.stx
Depending on context, you may have access to a device, an event, or both. Following is a list of the attributes and methods you may want to use on device and event objects. The syntax for accessing device attributes and methods is ${dev/attributename}. For example, to get the manageIp of a device you would use ${dev/manageIp}. For events, the syntax is ${evt/attributename}.
A command to ping a device might look like this. (The ${..} is a TALES expression to get the manageIp value for the device.)
ping -c 10 ${device/manageIp}DNS Forward Lookup (assumes device/id is a resolvable name)
host ${device/id}DNS Reverse Lookup
host ${device/manageIp}SNMP Walk
snmpwalk -v1 -c${device/zSnmpCommunity} ${device/manageIp} system
To use these expressions effectively, you must know which objects, attributes, and methods are available, and in which contexts. Usually there is a device that allows you to access the device in a particular context. Contexts related to a particular event usually have event defined.