PingMon: A stupid local-networking host 'ping' monitoring tool

One day at work I needed to periodically ping a host on our local network. Then I thought it would be great (well... just nice) that when the pings were unsuccessful I would get notified by email.

I was learning Ruby at that time and, instead of writing a simple shell script and set a cron job I thought... Maybe I could write a script in Ruby for this, Maybe I could practice writing some tests, I could even create a gem and learn how it's done, etc.

And this is the result:

A stupid monitoring tool which periodically pings a host and sends an email notification when it becomes unavailable.

It's been done merely for learning purposes so don't be too harsh on the code.

Installation & Usage

1. Install the gem as usual by entering: $ gem install pingmon

2. PingMon needs a YAML configuration file to operate, which is usually: ~/.pingmon.yml. To make PingMon create that file for you, type: $ pingmon build-config

3. Edit ~/.pingmon.yml to suit your needs.

4. Finally, type pingmon on your prompt and have fun! ;)

.pingmon.yml options

There are a number of options you can tweak in the .pingmon.yml config file. They are pretty self-explanatory but I'll explain some of them here:

• host: specifies the host to 'ping' to.
• mode: PingMon operation mode which should be one of monitor or ping. In ping mode, PingMon will ping the host specified one time only (for testing purposes). When in monitor mode, PingMon will ping the host specified periodically following the monitor_interval option.
• monitor_interval: when set to monitor mode it specifies the delay between pings to check the host status. ex: Setting it to 15m will ping the host every 15 minutes.
• notify_when_down: true or false. Tells PingMon to send an email notification when host can't be reached.
• notify_to: whom to notify (if more than one, comma separated). ex: [email protected]
• transport: :sendmail or :smtp. :sendmail may only work on unix/linux OS variants.
• smtp_options: when transport: is set to :smtp you should specify this options. They are passed as is to Pony.mail method.

For more help, please take a look at the sample config file config/pingmon.yml or at the one PingMon generates for you when you type pingmon build-config which is usually located at: $HOME/.pingmon.yml.

External Dependencies

PingMon depends on the following gems:

• eventmachine ~> 0.12.10
• rufus-scheduler ~> 2.0.6
• pony ~> 1.0.1

Notes:

• eventmachine and rufus-scheduler are used when doing "pings" in monitor mode.
• Pony adds the mail sending logic
• This requirements are specified in the gemspec as well.

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Coded by Estanislau Trepat, released under the MIT License: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php