Watchmonkey CLI

Watchmonkey is a very simple tool to monitor resources with Ruby without the need of installing agents on the systems you want to monitor. To accomplish this the application polls information via SSH or other endpoints (e.g. websites, FTP access). It's suitable for small to medium amounts of services.

Before looking any further you might want to know:

• There is no escalation or notification system (except experimental telegram bot) but you may add it yourself
• I originally created this for being used with Platypus hence the Platypus Hook
• This is how the text output looks like: Screenshot
• This is how the Platypus support looks like: ProgressBar HTML/WebView
• This is how Telegram Bot looks for now: Telegram Screenshot

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Help

If you need help or have problems open an issue.

Features

• Monitor external resources (Web, FTP, Server health via SSH)
• Run once or loop forever with ReQueue (define intervals globally, per checker or per single test)
• Includes a selection of buildin checkers (see list or config template)

Requirements

• Ruby >= 2.0
• Unixoid OS (such as Ubuntu/Debian, OS X, maybe others) or Windows (not recommended)
• something you want to monitor

Installation

• gem install watchmonkey_cli
• watchmonkey --generate-config [name=default]
• Edit the created file to fit your needs
• Run watchmonkey
• Check out the additional features below (e.g. ReQueue)

Usage

To get a list of available options invoke Watchmonkey with the --help or -h option:

Usage: watchmonkey [options]
# Application options
        --generate-config [myconfig] Generates a example config in ~/.watchmonkey
    -l, --log [file]                 Log to file, defaults to ~/.watchmonkey/logs/watchmonkey.log
    -t, --threads [NUM]              Amount of threads to be used for checking (default: 10)
    -e, --except tag1,tag2           Don't run tasks tagged with given tags
    -o, --only tag1,tag2             Only run tasks tagged with given tags
    -s, --silent                     Only print errors and infos
    -q, --quiet                      Only print errors

# General options
    -d, --debug [lvl=1]              Enable debug output
    -m, --monochrome                 Don't colorize output
    -h, --help                       Shows this help
    -v, --version                    Shows version and other info
    -z                               Do not check for updates on GitHub (with -v/--version)
        --dump-core                  for developers

Documentation

Writing a documentation takes time and I'm not sure if anyone is even interested in this tool. If there is interest I will write a documentation but for now this Readme must suffice. If you need help just open an issue :)

Create configs

Use the --generate-config option or refer to the configuration template for examples and documentation.

Deactivate configs

If you want to deactivate single configs just rename the file to start with two underscores (e.g.: __example.rb).

Application configuration

If you want to add custom checkers, hooks or change default settings you can create ~/.watchmonkey/config.rb. The file will be eval'd in the application object's context. Take a look at the example configuration file and application.rb.

Custom checkers

If you want to monitor something that is not covered by the buildin handlers you can create your own, it's not that hard and should be a breeze if you are used to Ruby. All descendants of the WatchmonkeyCli::Checker class will be initialized and are usable in the application. Documentation is thin but you can take a look at the example checker, the buildin checkers or just open an issue and I might just implement it real quick.

Additional Features

ReQueue

By default Watchmonkey will run all tests once and then exit. This addon will enable Watchmonkey to run in a loop and run tests on a periodic interval. Since this seems like a core feature it might get included directly into Watchmonkey but for now take a look at the application configuration file and ReQueue source code for integration examples.

Telegram Bot

Notify via Telegram. Experimental. Refer to application configuration file and TelegramBot source code for further information.

• works with ReQueue (wouldn't make much sense otherwise huh?)
• optional per-user message throttling via checker uniqid (checker name + host + arguments)
• optional per-user only/except filters based on tags
• planned: robust telegram connection failure handling
• planned: per-user regex exclusion filters

Platypus support

Platypus is a MacOS software to create dead simple GUI wrappers for scripts. There is buildin support for the interface types ProgressBar and WebView. For integration examples take a look at the application configuration file and Platypus hook source code.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome! Either report errors, bugs and propose features or directly submit code:

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Legal

• © 2016, Sven Pachnit (www.bmonkeys.net)
• watchmonkey_cli is licensed under the MIT license.