

Monitor anything and get free notifications on your iPhone (via notifo.com) - amix
http://amix.dk/blog/post/19526#Monitor-anything-and-get-notifications-on-your-iPhone

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compumike
This kind of server monitoring is exactly why we wrote and released
<http://www.nerdkits.com/files/notifo/> two months ago (although our server
monitoring component itself hasn't been released). We don't use it for payment
notifications as the screenshot might suggest, as that would get annoying very
quickly! Instead, my co-founder and I get notifo alerts when anything might be
out-of-bounds: daemons not running, load averages, memory usage, DNS/web test
queries, various queues, etc. This gets tied in with our internal business
dashboard, so we can see warnings before they get to the "failed" state that
triggers a notifo, or usually just see a bunch of nice green checkmarks
underneath our sales stats!

Honestly, after running it for 2+ months, the problem is that it's been _too_
sensitive, so recently the progress has been in adding logic to make it ignore
and/or fix and/or retry without notifying us at all. For example, if one of
our secondary nameservers is unreachable, my script knows that I don't care,
but it will let me know if two or more are down -- and only after trying a few
times. And if our Asterisk instance can't talk to our SIP provider, then it
will instruct Asterisk to try to reconnect. Another example is in our Django
FastCGI processes restarting after serving a bunch of queries (to reduce the
effect of process memory growth / leaks): if our script does its checks at
that time, it may notice one extra or one fewer process running, so it will
wait a few seconds and then check again.

At the end of the day, while notifo is only a small piece of the code at this
point, it's a core feature that motivated this "autotester" server monitoring
script and makes it a must-have for us. We've had it running for long enough
that we have fairly good test coverage for all of the moving parts of our
server, and over the last few weeks have been able to write some smarts into
it so that the frequency of Notifo alerts is small enough that they're usually
worth looking into.

From a business perspective: This lets my co-founder and I sleep much better
and have our mind off of server operations when traveling. That's a real
benefit. Thanks, Notifo!

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PStamatiou
Great to hear about a Notifo use case like this - thank you for sharing!

edit: on the subject of electronics, we (chad and I @ notifo) have had an idea
for little project for a while. So we work in a garage and think it would be
neat to hook in RFID + arduino + solenoid + wishield or wifi yellowjacket +
notifo for garage access logging/notifications. IE, one of us gets a notifo
when the other tags his RFID to get into the office. I guess we're just
looking for an excuse to dust off our arduinos..

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jazzychad
Very cool, Amir. We're flattered that a busy hacker such as yourself would
take the time to write this up :)

~~~
amix
I think you guys have a cool service. I was about to setup nagios+Clickatell
for service notifications, but 30 mins into the configs from hell I dropped
this idea and started to work on a custom solution.

Happy hacking, I am keeping an eye on notifo :)

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tcarnell
You can do this with Femtoo.com (it's already listed on the Notifo homepage as
a recommended service). Try it - it's cool!

