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."

Comments

Try Zabbix, it's free

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Try Zabbix, it's free

[richlv]

you absolutely do not need any paid component to do notifications. actually, one of the biggest things about zabbix is that it's true opensource - no "open core" or other bullshit, it's all open source. of course, anybody is free to put out some proprietary application, but anything zabbix team does is opensource.

as for notifications, you can do email, sms, jabber/xmpp and eztexting using the built-in methods, and you can easily extend this without paying for any application

Re:Try Zabbix, it's free

[philip.paradis]

It seems Zabbix isn't well suited for the use cases you care about. That's fine, but it should be noted that your preference for SNMP-based offerings is far from universal. I've dealt with environments where thousands of systems across several continents were constantly monitored without SNMP, and things worked very well.

You seem quite interested in forcibly proclaiming your preference for certain modes of monitoring. Are you equally prepared to discuss the security implications of those choices? Are all devices under your control operating exclusively over trusted networks and exclusively utilizing SNMPv3? If you're going to speak forcefully about these things, let's go ahead and have a frank conversation that includes different considerations and use cases.

Re:Try Zabbix, it's free

[richlv]

i'm wondering which version that must have been, as zabbix has natively supported snmp since... i might be off by a couple of years here, but 2001 or so.
snmp trap support was improved with 2.0, which came out more than a year ago.

Thanks for the ad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Thanks for the ad

[SwedishCoward]

Or as Bill Gates would put it, "When you're dying of malaria, nothing sucks more than finding an 'Error establishing database connection' on your blog hours after the fact".

Re: Thanks for the ad

[dantotheman]

Just because he has a kid that crys over needles, doesn't mean he deserves a +1.

Ohhhh, you meant the other kind of "parent"....

I use SiteUptime.com

[CrudPuppy]

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"

Re:Nothing sucks more ...

[turbidostato]

"... than people advertizing their paid products and services in Slashdot posts." ...and taking Slashdot people for idiots.

"it's not easy to find inexpensive, simple monitoring solutions which support smartphone notifications"

Are you kidding? It's stupidly easy. Nagios, Icinga, Zabbix, Pandora, Ganglia, Zenoss and dozens of others I forgot about can do that. Heck, monitoring is probably one of the biggest categories in open source devlopment and using a gateway to whatever is trivially easy in all of them.

Re:Better solution

[turbidostato]

"The reason for this, is a lot of us want a tiered response level."

Me too.

"Email should be something that can wait until you're in the office again. Text and phone calls are for immediate attention 24x7"

Because?

No, seriously, because?

It can be argued that SMS/pager *when done properly* and, of course, on fully owned hardware, can be more resilient than email but other than that, it's stupid to say "email should be something that can wait till tomorrow, text is for immediate" action". Please, think a bit about it and you'll see how stupid is.

Now: immediate attention 24x7 information I want ASAP, information that can wait I want clearly known as that. *THIS* makes sense, not the gateway such information happens, to come to you through.

I've been doing the Nagios thing for ages too and I tiered information to syslog, email, SMS, database, to first, second, third support/management levels... you name it.

But there's no problem in having the CRITICAL messages for high priority services to be delivered to a specific maildir folder that happens to be the one that I subscribe on my mobile's email client and that makes an alert tone ring upon reception.

Re:Timothy needs to be fucking fired.

[TheGratefulNet]

nagios and the rest of the so-called free NMS's fall down horribly in terms of features unless you buy the commercial version.

I hate that!

our company did an eval of most of the free NMS tools and avoided most of them since the freebie version was mostly just a way to get you to buy the paid-for version. the paid-for versions all look good but we did not want to have to buy stuff.

we took xymon, added our own poller, trap receiver engine and some other goodies and it did not take too much effort to do that. the infrastructure is not too bad and being written in C made things pretty easy to change.

if you want to buy, be my guest; but I prefer to be able to change things at the source level and the paid-for versions usually don't give source with the license.