First we'll get the network scanning portion of the Python script up and running. The following code does a basic scan for a specific set of ports on a given host and prints some of the results.

import nmap

def scan(host='127.0.0.1',range='22-80'):
  nm = nmap.PortScanner()
  nm.scan(host, range)
  return nm

nm = scan()

print "Hosts scanned: " + str(nm.all_hosts())
for host in nm.all_hosts():
  print "Host state: " + str(host) + ": " + nm[host].state()
  print "Protocols checked: " + str(nm[host].all_protocols())
  for proto in nm[host].all_protocols():
    print "Ports checked: " + str(nm[host][proto].keys())
    for port in nm[host][proto].keys():
      print "Port status: " + str(port) + ": " + str(nm[host][proto][port])

As you can see there are three different loops. In the example only a single host is checked and only tcp ports are considered and no services were found, as shown in the output below.

shell> python nmap-tutorial-mini.py
Hosts scanned: [u'127.0.0.1']
Host state: 127.0.0.1: up
Protocols checked: []

After turning on the ssh service on the host, you can see the results of the script change:

shell> python nmap-tutorial-mini.py
Hosts scanned: [u'127.0.0.1']
Host state: 127.0.0.1: up
Protocols checked: [u'tcp']
Ports checked: [22]
Port status: 22: {'state': u'open', 'reason': u'syn-ack', 'name': u'ssh'}

With the above information we have a variety of information tidbits to use in our logging application. You can download the script from: nmap-tutorial-mini.py