Want agentless and free monitoring tools which can monitor your customer front-end servers (ie. web, email)? then PHP Server monitor is one of your best choice. It’s a very light tools built from php scripts (KB size) and must be installed on any web server which has an internet connection. With this tools at least you can be notified earlier every time when one of the server goes down especially during midnight.

1.Installation

The installation is pretty straight forward but you have to must make sure that your php installation must compiled with a curl module. Then some tweak are needed for the script in order to make sure email notification is working especially the phpmailer.class.php.

• Extract and upload the script to your www root
• create new mysql database
• create config.php with appropriate parameters
• Install it by launching ../install.php from your browser

2.Setup

Any user can be created though at this moment there is no AD/LDAP integration. One more thing, there is no authentication page and anyone who knows the url, at anytime just can add their own server to the list. So just beware..

• Add user
• Add server with appropriate port number,

3.Optional (Email Notification)

My Fedora 13 is require some hard work for the sendmail especially when you try to run m4. So, what I did was, I’ve started with just a few lines of sendmail.cf and add additional define/feature into it one by one. I’m using gmail smtp as a smart host and it’s working fine as expected.

• Enable email monitoring in php server monitor config
• Configure sendmail with smart host
• Cronjob to check server status

Within hours, now I have a tools which can monitor a list of external servers and send an email alerts every time when the server goes down. Proactive monitoring? Not a big deal..
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