As we\'re a web software development company, we\'ve got many applications runni

Question

As we're a web software development company, we've got many applications running on different servers. Sometimes, we get notified about some of them being down by different issues.

Is there any server/application/tool which checks the state of a given url (performing raw HTTP GET requests) sequencially, given a concrete interval? It would be also interesting if we can add a mail server configuration in order to notify administrators if the site is down.

It shouldn't be so complicated to build ourselves, but I want just to check if there's something available just to avoid reinventing the wheel.

The tool should provide the next features:

Tool we can install in our web servers, not to be dependent on third party services
Kind of service which can be manually started/stoped
Lightweight solution
Runnable at least on Linux, will be interesting to have it on Windows too
Open source / Cheap alternative

Explanation / Answer

What you're looking for falls under the category of monitoring software.

I've used mon for that. Now I'm not an expert, so I can't really say how it compares to the many other monitoring tools out there, but based on your description it should work well for you.

Tool we can install in our web servers ? apt-get install mon or yum install mon or whatever it is on your distribution
Kind of service which can be manually started/stoped ? service mon start/stop
Lightweight solution ? the program and its documentation take about 1MB
Runnable at least on Linux, will be interesting to have it on Windows too ? should be in all major Linux distribution; there's no Cygwin package though.
Open source ? yes, it's Debian-compliant free.

Mon is simple to get going. Out of the box on Debian/Ubuntu, it sends me (root) email when the Apache server on the same box goes down. Obviously you have to edit the configuration file to make it monitor other hosts. Mon comes with monitoring for hosts (ping), HTTP, FTP, SMTP, MySQL, available disk space and many more services, and you can run arbitrary commands to monitor services that are not built-in. Alerts can be sent via email, SNMP or custom methods.

Mon does not try to restart services that have gone down, that goes beyond its job.

You may want to explore the monitoring tag on Unix & Linux and on Server Fault to see if some alternatives catch your fancy.

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