I relatively recently signed up with a new ISP and I have about 2 weeks to determine if their uptime is sufficient for running a server. My initial plan was to install Nagios on an old laptop and store it at a friend's house, but – long story short – a server at a friend's house is not feasible.
I have a two-fold goal:
- In the short term, I need something to determine if the new Internet connection is stable enough to run a server on. It doesn't need to alert me every time the Internet goes down, but it does need to have some kind of log I can look at to see if there was any downtime.
- In the longer term, I would like something that would alert me as soon as it has a problem reaching the server.
Ideally, I could accomplish both goals with the same piece of software.
I have an irrational aversion to SaaS, so I was thinking since I have an always-on, always-connected Linux box in my pocket (in the form of an Android phone), surely there's some existing tool for it to monitor the server's uptime.
When I scoured the Internet for such an app, it was a descent into madness. Many "monitoring" apps only check the server when you open up the app and tell it to ping. I want to set it up once, and then have the phone run checks every 1-5 minutes without any further action on my part. I don't mind it saturating my phone's data connection since I'm only really going to be wailing on it for the next 2 weeks. After that I can reduce the polling frequency.
Because I haven't found any such app, I'm thinking I can accomplish the first goal with a cron job on the server that would ping Google or something and write a log. This seems like the simplest option for right now, but it doesn't address the longer-term goal for monitoring.
Potentially relevant information: My budget is $0. All my devices are Linux or Android.
I'm hoping the brilliant people of Server Fault will have some insight/recommendation on how to best accomplish this goal. Thanks.
Best Answer
Its a bit of a shopping question, but I'll answer anyway since its a useful sysadmin tool: Decaf Monitor does exactly what you are asking. There are plenty of hosted services which do this, and if monitoring a single server its often free. I've found Montastic good enough for casual monitoring. For one server where you aren't willing to invest much money, you are right about the irrationality of being averse to this kind of solution.
Really though, if you are doing this in any sort of professional way (to be on topic on this site) then why would you host a single server yourself when you can rent rackspace or a VPS for around USD300 a year with massive redundancy and gigabit connection speeds?
If you really want to host, and again assuming that this is a professional question, then any ISP you should consider will offer an enforceable service level agreement. If they offer this you can bet they are very unlikely to fail to meet it.