PhpWatchDog 1.16.7 review

PhpWatchDog is a network monitor application which provides a simple way to check if a service (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc.) is running or n

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Paolo Conti

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PhpWatchDog is a network monitor application which provides a simple way to check if a service (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc.) is running or not. PhpWatchDog project can send email to the server's administrator to report malfunctions.

This little script is running into my servers from some time (even from two years!). It's very usefull to alert a system administrators team by email. It's a PHP script, so you can setup a cronjob that run the URL of phpwatchdog's installation when you want (I suggest every hour).

Here are some key features of "PhpWatchDog":
check if service is UP or DOWN
no need to install anything into monitored servers
report to one email address if service is DOWN
simple and light
easy to install and configure
can set the timeout for probing the service status
can use fsockopen (PHP) or IO::Socket (PERL) - if for any reasons the fsockopen can operate correctly
can monitor n servers with a single instance
can alert a custom email address per server
to work properly need only APACHE+PHP, no databases or various plugins
collect each downtime event into a plain text file

Installation:

unpack the downloaded archive

# tar jxvf phpwatchdog-*.tar.bz2

enter into phpwatchdog/ directory and edit the config file (config.php)

# cd phpwatchdog
# nano config.php

Note: here you can see nano, that is an easy to use text editor, but I strongly encourage to learn to use vim (the enhanced version of vi)

put your servers into config.php

$i++;
$config['Servers'][$i]['host'] = '66.35.250.203';
$config['Servers'][$i]['server_name'] = 'www.sourceforge.net';
$config['Servers'][$i]['service'][1] = '80';
$config['Servers'][$i]['service'][2] = '443';

Every server configuration block must begin with the line "$i++;"
customize your email account for alert reporting into config.php
fire up your browser and go to phpwatchdog installation's path

You can schedule the execution of this script putting a similar command into /etc/cron.hourly/ /usr/bin/php-cgi -q /path/of/phpwatchdog/index.php > /dev/null

or using lynx

lynx -dump http://webhost/path/of/phpwatchdog/index.php > /dev/null 2>&1

or with wget

wget -O /dev/null http://webhost/path/of/phpwatchdog/index.php > /dev/null 2>&1

The directory tools contains some usefull scripts:

chk_socket2.pl - it's a Perl script used to check the service status if PHP mode is disabled
generate.sh - it's a bash script used to generate (with the help of generate.awk) a configuration block from nmap output
sh generate.sh

Usage:

generate.sh IPADDR SERVERNAME
eg:
generate.sh 192.168.0.1 MailServer.com