monico 0.1.dev0

Monico is a simple command-line utility for efficiently monitoring and analyzing the availability of websites.

Monico

Introduction

Monico is a simple command-line utility for efficiently monitoring and analyzing the availability of websites.

Monico CLI is built with a focus on ease of use, flexibility, and reliability. It allows configuring website monitoring to collect essential data such as response times, status codes, and content checks, storing all information in a structured format for easy retrieval and analysis.

Features

• Easy Configuration: Set up monitors for websites with a simple CLI.
• Flexible Monitoring: Define custom intervals and content checks for each monitor.
• Data Insights: Review monitoring data directly from CLI.
• Secure and Reliable: Built with security and reliability in mind, ensuring your monitoring is always up and running.

Setup and Configuration

Prerequisites

You need Python 3.11 to run monico. Additionally, make sure you have PostgreSQL libraries installed on your system. For Mac:

brew install libpq

For Ubuntu linux:

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

Installation

monico is distributed as a standard python package. Installing it in your system is as simple as:

git clone <repo-url> monic
cd monico/
pip install .

Note: Installing psycopg2 fails on Apple Silicon inside of venv. If you stumble upon this issue, it's easy enough to fix by pointing clang linker to the openssl:

export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/include"

More here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26288042/error-installing-psycopg2-library-not-found-for-lssl

Configuration

Verify that monico is installed:

$ monico version
0.1.dev0

Note: it's also possible to use monico through Python module syntax e.g:

$ python -m monico version
0.1.dev0

Monico is configured through config file .monico.toml in user home directory or using environment variables. Supported configuration options:

• postgres_uri (or environment variable MONICO_POSTGRES_URI): required, connection string to connect to database
• log_level (or environment variable LOG_LEVEL): optional, controls logging verbicity. Valid values are DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR and CRITICAL. Default is WARNING.

Create the configuration file before continuing setup:

Example ~/.monico.toml

postgres_uri="postgres://user:pwd@host:5432/monico"
log_level="INFO"

When configuration is created, run monico setup to initialize the database. In future, to re-initialize the database use monico setup --force (careful, this will destroy all pre-existing data!).

Simple Execution

Open two terminals. In the first one run

monico run

In the second one, create the monitor, for example:

monico create --id scorpil --endpoint "https://scorpil.com" --name "Scorpil's Blog" --interval 5 --body-regexp "The Long Road to [A-Za-z0-9/]+"

Now it's possible to watch the monitor execution results with status command:

monico status --id scorpil --live

To see the full list of available CLI commands run

$ monico --help
Usage: monico [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  create       Creates a new monitor
  delete       Deletes a monitor.
  list         Lists configured monitors.
  run          Starts both manager and worker processes concurrently.
  run-manager  Starts the manager process.
  run-worker   Starts the worker process.
  setup        Initializes the database
  status       Displays status of a monitor
  version      Prints the version

You can also print help for every command:

$ monico create --help
Usage: monico create [OPTIONS]

  Creates a new monitor

Options:
  --id TEXT           ID of the monitor
  --name TEXT         Name of the monitor
  --endpoint TEXT     URL to monitor
  --interval INTEGER  Monitoring interval in seconds
  --body-regexp TEXT  Regular expression to match in the response body
  --help              Show this message and exit.

Advanced execution

Separate workers

monico consists of two major parts:

• Manager process is only responsible for scheduling tasks (probes). Manager is lightweight so performance-wise it is enough to run a single manager instance at a time. However, it's ok to run multiple manager instances concurrently for redundancy.
• Worker process performs HTTP requests and records results. It is possible to run multiple instances of worker for improved scalability and availability guarantees.

monico run runs both processes concurrently, but it's possible to run them seperately with monico run-manager and monico run-worker respectively. It's possible to run multiple instances of each process for scalability and reliability.

Complete app state is stored in database, so it's possible to e.g. run manager/workers processes on a server and control them from a local environment just by configuring monico to use the same database.

Running in Docker

It's possible to run monico in Docker by building an image as follows:

docker build . -t monic

Then running monico as follows:

docker run -tie MONICO_POSTGRES_URI="<your-postgres-uri>" monico <arguments>

For example:

docker run -tie MONICO_POSTGRES_URI="postgres://user:pwd@host:5432/monico" monico status --id my-monitor --live

Testing

To execute tests, you need to install development dependencies:

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Now you can run unit tests with

make test-unit

For integration tests you also need to export environment variable MONICO_TEST_POSTGRES_URI`` (note the TEST` part), e.g:

export MONICO_TEST_POSTGRES_URI="postgres://user:pwd@host:5432/monico"

To run integrations tests:

make test-integration

To run all tests and calculate code-coverage percentage:

make test

Architecture

There are a few core concepts Monico uses:

• Monitor is a core Monico entity representing a specific website monitoring task. It encapsulates all the details and settings required to periodically check a website's availability and performance, such as endpoint url, check frequency, regex pattern for data lookup etc. When a monitor is active, Monico periodically sends requests (i.e. probes) to the specified URL at the defined frequency. It then captures key data from the response, such as response time and HTTP status code. If a regex pattern is provided, Monico also checks the response content against this pattern.
• Task is a scheduled item of work, i.e. check that is to be executed.
• Probe is an individual instance of a monitoring check performed by Monico. Each probe is an action initiated by a Monitor to assess the current state of a specified website.
• Manager is an internal scheduling component in Monico responsible for orchestrating the execution of Probes according to their defined frequencies. It does this be creating tasks for workers to pick up.
• Worker is a component that is responsible for performing monitoring checks (Probes) and recording the execution results. Multiple worker singles are allowed to run concurrently to enable scaling.

TODO

• Test coverage is at 88% and could be improved. The main culprit here is just time constraints.
• Tests around CLI commands require database connection right now. This can be eliminated by reorganising the code in a minor way and mocking a few places.
• Locking batch size should be configurable