Prowl is a nifty iPhone App -- it's basically a Growl client for the iPhone. It's got a neato web API that allows pretty much any program to send it notifications. Site monitoring seems like a pretty good use of this capability. Setup a cron job and you can get by-the-minute notifications on an array of sites that you are responsible for maintaining.
This is a pretty barebones little script; you only need to edit:
- Sites_To_Check -- An array of URLs to check. HTTP and HTTPS work fine as long as your Ruby install supports 'em.
- Prowl_API_Keys -- An array of at least one (1) and up to five (5) Prowl API Keys. You can get your API Key by signing into the Prowl Site.
- Priority -- Prowl notification priority. Can be an integer between -2 (lowest priority) and 2 (emergency). Set to 2 by default.
- Provider_Key -- A Prowl Provider key. Find out more about these on the Prowl API Page. Empty by default.
- Max_Redirects -- If the page redirects you, how many redirects should you follow before you give up? You'll want this to be at least 1 unless you're positive that all of your URLs never do 3xx redirects. Set to 3 by default.
You can run this script from the command-line and it'll check your sites right away. However, you'll probably want to setup a cron job or some other sort of scheduled task to automatically check your sites for you on a regular basis. On a UNIX machine, you can simply type: crontab -e to open up your cron schedule. To check your sites every five minutes, add this line to your crontab:
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /path/to/findtheproblems.rb
This program is free software; it is distributed under an MIT License.
Copyright (c) 2009 Matthew Riley MacPherson.