webcronmon 1.0.2

Webcron.org Site Monitor

Shows websites monitored on Webcron.org in kiosk mode.

At Seantis we use Webcron.org to monitor our sites. For our customers, as well as for our office monitor screen, we wanted a simple auto-refreshing page that shows the status of our sites at a glance. We therefore wrote this small Flask application looking like this:

The monitor only shows the bare minimum of information to keep things simple:

• list monitors by group

• link the monitors to the actual website

• show the current state (online / offline since)

• show the uptime of the last 30 days

The site will update the list every 60 seconds by default, unless configured otherwise or unless the timer on the upper right is toggled with a mouse-click.

Demo

http://monitor.seantis.ch

Requirements

• Python 2.7

Installation

Create a new folder:

mkdir webcronmon

Open it:

cd webcronmon

Initialize a virtual environment:

virtualenv --no-site-packages -p python2.7 .

Install webcronmon:

pip install webcronmon

Initialize the configuration:

init-webcronmon

Configuration

Before you run webcronmon you need to edit the config.ini file created by init-webcronmon. At the least you need to enter your webcron API credentials, but there are other configuration entries you might wish to adjust.

All the configuration options are described in the config.ini that was created for you.

Running

To start webcronmon simply execute run-webcronmon in the folder in which you have edited your config.ini

Deployment

We recommend to only run one webcronmon instance and offer it through a reverse proxy. Personally we use Circus by Mozilla with the following circus.ini:

[watcher:webcronmon]
gid = webcronmon
uid = webcronmon
cmd = /home/webcronmon/app/bin/run-webcronmon
virtualenv = /home/webcronmon/app
working_dir = /home/webcronmon/app
numprocesses = 1
singleton = True
copy_env = True

As a reverse proxy we use Nginx as follows:

server {
    server_name monitor.seantis.ch;

    listen      80;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8081;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_redirect off;
    }
}

To start the server reload nginx:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

And start webcronmon through circus:

sudo circusctl start webcronmon

Copyright

Seantis GmbH

License

MIT

History

1.0.2 (2014-01-22)

• Fixes wrong monitor urls when the protocol is defined redundantly.

• Adds clickable group-headers for groups defined in routes. Fixes #2.

1.0.1 (2013-05-03)

• Fixes the app crashing when a monitor reports an offline server.

1.0 (2013-04-22)

• Initial Release