Re: it scares me a bit...

[alex black]

> "Remote page grepping" feature you originally proposed. Even armed
> with this feature, you will not be able to check that your dynamic
> content is served properly. For these purposes I propose you to create
> some clever self-diagnostics script on the remote web server, which
> e.g. checks the database backend, does some queries etc., and if all
> is okay, returns the content with a known checksum. This output may
> again be checked by monit's existing facility.

If you were to create a script (for example) on your dynamic site that 
reported if the database connection was OK then you could checksum the 
result (OK or ERROR etc) (thought I'd rather do a grep, much more 
flexible). If however you wanted to check that no error messages were 
coming up on some pages it would be extremely helpful to have a content 
grep. Also - checksumming a whole http return is useless if you have 
randomly selected content presented on a page from a database - so 
again it's very useful to be able to search content to verify that no 
errors are occurring.

> By self-diagnostics web script you will be able to do checks that will
> by far exceed monit's abilities (with grepping included!),

Indeed, if I have a self-diagnostics web script _combined_ with monit 
and grepping, I have the ultimate solution.

> just
> because it will be written by you and only you exactly know what to
> check. As a cherry on a cream, you can make a script output human
> readable status page. Once it's checksum changes, monit alerts and
> anyone can peek with a browser and see what is wrong in detail. Monit
> tells you only "Bad, but I'm trying, man...".

Monit, unlike any script that I write, has the ability to restart 
apache in an attempt to correct the problem. It also has all of the 
notification, and the nice file format built in.

best,

_alex