ServerMonitor is a small java program that monitors a server and sends email to the administrator when the server is not available.

I have been having some reliability problems with a server that I depend on and wanted an easy way to be notified if there server had stopped running. This program is very simple to use.

Use Case Diagram

Deployment Diagram

The program consists of a single java file ServerMonitor.java [text] and a script smctl.sh to start and stop the monitor.

Description
I need feedback regarding a service running on Server. I run a ServerMonitor daemon on Monitor that periodically checks to see if it can connect to Server on a specific port. If it can, I assume all is well. If not, ServerMonitor checks to see if Reference Host is visible. This is to distinguish between an actual failure in Server and a local problem with the connectivity of Monitor to either Server or Reference Host. If there is any failure to connect with Server then email is sent through Notification Server to the administrator.

Installation
Create a directory serverMon on Monitor and put ServerMonitor.java and smctl.sh in that directory. Then cd to that directory and follow these directions.

Set smctl.sh to be executable with $chmod u+x
Compile Servermonitor.java with $javac ServerMonitor.java
You should now have a directory that looks something like this.

[drew@drewsG5 serveMon]$ chmod u+x smctl.sh 
[drew@drewsG5 serveMon]$ javac ServerMonitor.java 
[drew@drewsG5 serveMon]$ ls -la
total 16
drwxr-xr-x    5 drew     drew          170 May  2 22:22 .
drwxr-xr-x   11 drew     drew          374 May  2 22:20 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 drew     drew         3617 May  2 22:22 ServerMonitor.class
-rw-r--r--    1 drew     drew         5794 May  2 14:22 ServerMonitor.java
-rwxr--r--    1 drew     drew          493 May  2 22:18 smctl.sh
[drew@drewsG5 serveMon]$ 

Configuration
Now you need to edit smctl.sh to set the relevant parameters.

# Edit these lines for your particular setup
HOST=www.host.com
PORT=80
INTERVAL=10
REFHOST=refhost
REFPORT=81
ADMIN=you@localhost
SMTPHOST=mail.localhost

Operation
To start ServerMonitor, $./smctl.sh start
To stop the monitor, $./smctl.sh

[drew@drewsG5 serverMon]$ ./smctl.sh start
[drew@drewsG5 serverMon]$ tail -f log.out 
Starting ServerMonitor. host:mail.host.edu port:25 refHost:www.host.edu refPort:80 interval:10
adminEmail:you@localhost smtpHost:mail.smtp.localhost
[Mon May 03 17:18:31 PDT 2004] mail.host.edu seems to be running.

Note that only one email will be sent on server failure. When the message is received, you should examine log.out for details about the failure. Then I suggest that you stop and start ServerMonitor again to check for the next problem.

# TODO: check is pid file already exists - and ServerMonitor is already running
# so that we don't start twice.
# Check if running before we try to stop the process. i.e. make sure calling
# stop twice is not a problem. Would be nice to verify that the pid we are killing
# is actually the ServerMonitor process!

Feedback
Please feel free to contact me with any questions or to report any problems with ServerMonitor.