Need an external API to use for monitoring and other automation purposes

[majormoses]

Originally the chef sensu plugin used chef/rest to pull information about nodes and the server for monitoring purposes, in chef 13 this was deprecated without a clear successor. As ridley was very stable and used in berkshelf we moved to that but then they deprecated external use. We searched and found https://github.com/sethvargo/chef-api but it indicated it was under heavy development and not production ready so we held off now it has been archived. I spoke with @tas50 about this and he said we should open an issue here to discuss.

Issues:

• dependency ridley deprecated for external use sensu-plugins/sensu-plugins-chef#33 (current issue)
• rewrite plugin checks to use ridley sensu-plugins/sensu-plugins-chef#25 (when we re-wrote from chef/rest to ridley)

[lamont-granquist]

ah, yeah the deprecation comment:

"Chef::REST is deprecated. Please use Chef::ServerAPI, or investigate Ridley or ChefAPI."

Chef::ServerAPI and Chef::HTTP are the correct answers.

[lamont-granquist]

When that deprecation comment was written the person who wrote it was trying to be agnostic -- but as we've wound up having to maintain all three of those, we've largely killed off the latter two. Chef::ServerAPI is the internal replacement for Chef::REST and by the virtue of being the REST class for the client it has to be supported.