ox_mon 0.2.15

Monitor status, security, and robustness of your machines.

Introduction

The ox_mon package provides some tools to keep monitor your machine to keep it up to date, free of viruses, and generally working properly.

Basically, there are lots of little monitoring and checking tasks you may find yourself needing to do. You could write a separate script for each such task, but it would be nice to have some basic scaffolding for things like notifications, logging, testing, and so on to simplify machine monitoring. Better yet, by having a common framework many developers can contribute small snippets of such tools that work in a similar way to simplify life for everyone.

Once you install ox_mon as described in the Installation section, you can do something like

ox_mon check <thing> [<OPTIONS]

to run various checks discussed in the Checkers section with a consistent reporting system described in the Notifiers section.

One useful feature of ox_mon is that you can sign-up for free for the Sentry service at https://sentry.io and either set the environment variable SENTRY_DSN or provide the --SENTRY argument to your ox_mon commands and get notifications via sentry. This provides an easy way to run ox_mon commands in cron or other scripts and get convenient error notification on failures without having to configure a mail server or other tools.

Installation

You can install via the usual pip install ox_mon. If you want to install and be able to edit your installation, you may consider doing something like pip install --editable ox_mon.

Usage

You can see the list of possible commands via

ox_mon --help

Checkers

One of the most useful commands is ox_mon check. If you try

ox_mon check --help

you will see a list of possible checkers you can run. These all use the same general syntax for things like how to notify an administrator if issues are found while also checker specific customization.

Checker: apt

The apt checker will check your Ubuntu installation to see if you have the latest security updates installed. If you do, then nothing happens. If you have not done apt update recently or you do NOT have the latest security packages installed, then you will be notified.

You can control the notification methods and how many days have passed since you did apt update using command line options. For example, doing

ox_mon check apt --notifier echo --age-in-days 7

would not notify you provided that you have done apt update within 7 days. If your packages are stale, the notification will just print a message. See the Notifiers section for notification options.

Checker: disk

The disk checker will check your system to see if the disk is too full. If so, you will be notified as described in the Notifiers section.

You can control the notification methods and how full the disk is allowed to be before it triggers an alarm. For example, doing

ox_mon check disk --notifier loginfo --max-used-pct 5

would not notify you using python’s logging.INFO stream (which usually goes to stderr) if your disk is more than 5% full.

Checker: anti-virus

The clamscan checker will use ClamAV (assuming you have it installed) to virus scan your system. You can control the target location to scan via something like

ox_mon check clamscan --target $HOME

Backup

The ox_mon backup command group provides a way to use ox_mon for backups. Try

ox_mon backup --help

for information.

Raw commands

Ideally it is nicer to right your scripts using the ox_mon library interface since python is often more robust than shell scripts. If you have a quick task, however, you can use gcmd raw to run a generic raw command via something like:

ox_mon gcmd raw --cmd /bin/ls

You can also provide arguments or options for your raw command by using the --args option to gcmd and using colons instead of dashes (one outstanding feature request is to clean-up the colon syntax to make this less ugly):

ox_mon gcmd raw --cmd /bin/ls --args :lt

The benefit of using gcmd raw is that you can include sentry or other notifiers to report results of the command.

Notifiers

There are a variety of ways to get notifications:

• echo: Just echoes notification to stdout.

• email: Will send you an email provided you specify the following:

  • OX_MON_EMAIL_TO: A comma separated list of email addresses (e.g., [e-mail] or [e-mail],[e-mail]) to send email to. If not set, will attempt to lookup from environment variable.

  • OX_MON_EMAIL_FROM: Sending email address. If not set, will attempt to lookup from environment variable.

  • OX_MON_GMAIL_PASSWD: A password to use if you want to use gmail as the SMTP relay to send mail from. This password should correspond to the username in OX_MON_EMAIL_FROM.

  • OX_MON_SES_PROFILE: If provided and email notifier is requested, will use this to send email via AWS SES. If not set, will attempt lookup from environment.

  • IMPORTANT: Either OX_MON_SES_PROFILE or OX_MON_GMAIL_PASSWD is required to send emails.

• loginfo: Will use Python’s logging.info to send notification. This can be useful if you do not want the notifications in stdout but in stderr.

• sentry: Will use the Sentry service from https://sentry.io.

  • SENTRY: The sentry DSN for the project to notify. The default value for this will be taken from the SENTRY_DSN environment variable if it exists.