So recently I wanted to remotely monitor the performance of a web site at intervals. I just wanted the very basics: Make sure the site responds via HTTP, see how long it takes to download the HTML content of the page, and make sure the page contains specified text. Record the results of those things and let me view them in a graph. Seems like such a simple, simple request. Well, either those projects don’t exist or they do a horrible job marketing themselves because I was unable to find one. Everything I found wanted me to delve into the depths of their own custom and oh-so-cool configuration system, typically consisting of multiple config files linking together in some esoteric way. Well no more. I have a very simple Python script that does just that and no more. It pulls it’s work items from a MySQL database, then writes the results back into that database, generating graphs as it runs. In the spirit of DRY (don’t repeat yourself) this isn’t a daemon. This is a simple one-shot script so that you can run it manually as you see fit or just schedule it in cron. I intend to make the script use SQLite or XML by default to further reduce the amount of configuration and setup needed. I’ve submitted the project for approval at SourceForge, but I’ve gone ahead and registered the domain http://pynger.org/ either way.
