Simple Monitor: Low Cost Web Server Monitoring

I’m a Seattle-based technology consultant. If you found this tutorial helpful, please tweet it & follow me at @reifman.

Today, I’m releasing a productized version of Simple Monitor which offers a low cost, easy to use web server monitoring solution with email and smartphone notifications.

It’s available at SimpleMonitorApp.com. Downloading the code to host on your own server is $10. You can also get a pre-installed image at Digital Ocean for $25.

If you run a web site or blog of any importance to you or your business, it’s important to have a monitoring service to ensure that it’s always running, especially if you have a sophisticated service running background tasks. A good monitoring service can help you relax knowing that your site is operating well – unless you hear otherwise.

Simple Monitor is written in the Yii Framework (and can be installed on any PHP/MySQL capable server). It sends notifications via email and/or to a smartphone application called Pushover ($4.99 in the iOS App Store, also available for Android). It’s a simple, economical way to monitor your services via smartphone.

Simple Monitor ensures that your website is up, that your database is connected, that your disk isn’t full and that your background tasks are running successfully. If something goes wrong, it sends a notification to Pushover on your phone. When nothing’s wrong, it sends you a heartbeat notification every four hours so that you know your monitoring is running. It can even monitor web pages for content changes.

Learning More

Visit the Simple Monitor website for more information. You can also reach me on Twitter @reifman or email me directly.

Please feel free to share this with others on Twitter and elsewhere.

(Note: I have no affiliate with Pushover – although I will receive small commissions for Pushover sales through iTunes).