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How To Build a Simple Open Source Server Monitoring Solution With Mobile Support
reifman writes "Nothing sucks more than finding an 'Error establishing database connection' on your blog hours after the fact, but it's not easy to find inexpensive, simple monitoring solutions which support smartphone notifications. I wrote MonitorApp, a free, open source software applet which sends notifications to your iPhone (or Android) if anything goes wrong with your web site or services. This tutorial describes how to install and configure MonitorApp for your own purposes. The only cost is a $4.99 mobile application called Pushover — which links MonitorApp to your phone. Pushover also links with Nagios, a more complex open source option — but ironically, Nagios' website was down when I looked for it last month."
Why reinvent the wheel (and charge for it!) if you can get a more mature and complete solution for free?
http://www.zabbix.com/
Mobile integration:
http://www.zabbix.com/third_party_tools.php
The much cheaper and better option is to just have nagios send something to your phone. This can be done via email, email to sms gateway, jabber, or loads of other simple methods.
Xymon has had support to send messages to cellphones for years through a carriers email to sms gateway.
Not sure what's the advantage of having notification. Its also possible to create a separate web output that is more condensed for mobiles.
I will be sure to drop $5 on this pushover app, since certainly "Nothing sucks more than finding an 'Error establishing database connection' on your blog hours after the fact". Yep, not breaking my arm, or getting a speeding ticket, or having to watch my son cry uncontrollably as he get his shots at the doctor. None of those things compares to the thought that my blog was inaccessible for all of its millions of nonexistent readers. Thanks again, SlashNOT.
Since last century had been using mobile alerts from nagios and other monitoring systems. How this is something new? And if it requires a running app in your phone, plenty of nagios clients had been available for free for years. If this is a marketing ploy to sell Pushover, is not the brightest one.
... than people advertizing their paid products and services in Slashdot posts.
It's called Prowl. http://www.prowlapp.com/ Simply send an e-mail to a special e-mail address and you'll get a notification on your iPhone. And it's even cheaper than 5 bucks. Topic can be closed.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Check out jWatchdog on Google Code.
Comes with an Android client.
Your solution is not completely free and open if Pushover, which is a key component of the solution, is closed and commercial. Could you arrange an open and free component to replace Pushover?
OP should check http://www.nagios.org/ now. It's up.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I have Unagi on my phone and it makes it simple. Yeah it's a bandwidth hog, but a simple and helpful interface.
BTW the paid product placement is lame.
Icinga is the community-oriented fork of nagios. My experience was: write a c patch for nagios core to fix an annoying behavior (re: alerting correctness), put it up on the nagios list, get no response, a week later get a mail from the icinga dev team saying that the patch is really great and would it be OK if they used it in icinga (not required by license, they were just being polite).
After maintaining my own private branch of nagios for a while, now I get icinga from rpmforge with the patch already integrated. It's pretty much the bog standard open source stereotype.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Seriously?
How to build blah blah blah ...
Down load the zabbix or nagios virtual machine, run it, done.
Why do you have articles about shit that wasn't difficult or new when slashdot fucking started?
Instead you're just posting stupid slashvertisements from people because you're too ignorant to know the difference between common knowledge and a challenge.
You need to spend less time worrying about those stupid fucking pointless videos you do and more time understanding that technology is more than a way for your dumb ass to milk some paychecks out of this tired old website
Oh, wait, Taco quit ... that is all you do now isn't it?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
They are cheap, they support content recognition, are globally disperse, and they have good notification.
We wrote a simple page that does a DB query and returns "OK" if everything succeeds. Point SiteUptime to that sub-URL and monitor the content for "OK"
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I think people missed my point partly - for people that only run a blog or a few web sites, Nagios is complete overkill and it would take a long time to set up, figure out how to use and the steps I've seen for iOS integration are not simple. Ditto for Zabbix. I think if you really write out the steps for installing and configuring these tools to meet this scenario, your solution is way more cumbersome than this one. MonitorApp is a pretty simple solution with an app that can be easily customized (it's PHP) and it's free. It supports email notifications - and you can hook those into any notification provider you want. I chose the Pushover API because I want to get notified on my phone with alerts - it's simple and elegant. Plus, what's with all the negativity? If you don't like a post, skip it and read on - there's more coming.
Why is your cursor in the url testbox? Readers, visit a website and see what happens to the focus on the page. Are we smearing the competition?
Why would nagios or zabbix be overkill if your product still requires a 3rd party server to set stuff up? I'm sure you could find some service that would monitor your blog (or whatever publicly accessible service) and alert you if it's broken on the internet. Come to think of it, by sending you an ad in the alert message, you may even set up a business making this "free" for the user of the service. It's probably done already, if not, feel free to use the idea.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Why not just use nagios or other monitor program and set up SMS notifications? If you're already paying for texting, then no need for some silly $5 app. You can use nagios' features from your phone's browser after connecting to your VPN.
If you're just running a blog, a simple cron script polling your blog with ping and wget or curl would be cheaper. Notify yourself via SMS or email. No cost.
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That is a shame.
This once great site, the first weblog out here, is no more
that's what this is - it's just more robust than a 5 line script ... and therefore allows you to monitor any number of pages and sites.
and honestly - $5 = no cost to me. It's when you start talking about $18/mo fees for this that I start to say, what?