Re: hearbeat

[Daniel]

Sorin S. wrote:
> Hi Martin, 
> I wanted a heartbeat message to be sure the monit is
> up and running as I can't open the firewalls to access
> the monit console. The clients are particularly uneasy
> to open firewalls externally for monitoring purposes.
> But email is security friendly enough and can be
> routed with ease.
>
> The message can contain any text with some useful info
> (for example: 
> <server_name>,`date`,`uptime`, etc
> and the subject can be the actual FQDN of the box. 
>
> I can then parse the mbox for the heartbeat messages
> and alert if I haven't got one from monit in a certain
> time. 
> This is particularly usefull is one has hundreds of
> machines to look after.
> It might be strange, but in my experiece it is
> usefull.
> Let me know what you think about it...

You could just get them to set up a cron job which did something like a 
monit summary, which you could then parse.

Perhaps wrap it into a shell script and get it call it in cron.d or 
someone's crontab as often as you would like.

This gives the FQDN hostname, date, and monit summary output in an e-mail.

You probably would want to use mail instead of nail unless you have it 
installed.  You wouldn't even need it pipe it into anything if you get 
the mail from cron, but it is nice to get a separate report.

BIG NOTE: You will have to parse it well as the ***FAILING*** message 
won't work until monit returns failure codes for monit summary/monit 
status not working.

Regards

Daniel

address@hidden cron.daily]# cat ./monitalive.sh
#!/bin/bash
MONIT=""
monit summary >&/dev/null || MONIT="***FAILING*** "
(
hostname -f;
date;
monit summary 2>&1;
) | nail -r address@hidden -s "$(hostname -f) ${MONIT}monit 
report" address@hidden



--
Daniel Grant
The Total Team
http://www.totalteam.co.nz/
Ph   0800-888-326, +64-3-348-1667
Cell +64-27-407-2438
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