PHP Server Monitor

SUMMARY

PHP Server Monitor is a script that checks whether the servers on your list are up and running on the selected ports. It comes with a web based user interface where you can add and remove servers or websites from the MySQL database, and you can manage users for each server with a mobile number and email address.

With version 2.0 there's the support for websites as well. On the "Add server" page, you can choose whether it is a "service" or a "website":

• Service

  A connection will be made to the entered ip or domain, on the given port. This way you can check if certain services on your machine are still running. To check your IMAP service for example, enter port 143.

• Website

  The previous version only tried to establish a connection to the server on port 80. If you are running multiple websites on 1 machine, there was no proper way to check each website for possible errors. Also it was impossible to make sure your site was really up and running, all you knew was that the server was still online. This function takes care of that. You can enter a link to a website (for example http://sourceforge.net/index.php), it will use cURL to open the website and check the HTTP status code (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes for details). If the HTTP status code is in the 4xx range, it means an error occured and the website is not accesible to the public. In that case the script will return a "status offline", and will start sending out notifications.

Each server has it's own settings regarding notification. You can choose for email notification or text message (SMS). As of version 2.0, there are 3 gateways available:

• Mollie - http://www.mollie.nl
• Spryng - http://www.spryng.nl
• Inetworx - http://www.inetworx.ch
• Clickatell - https://www.clickatell.com

For these gateways you need an account with sufficient credits.

If logging is enabled in the configuration, it will log any connection errors, emails and text messages sent. The latest log records will be displayed on your web interface. The cron/status.cron.php can be added as a cronjob which will keep the server status up to date.

I'd appreciate any feedback you might have regarding this script. Please leave it on the GitHub project page (tracker), or send me an email (see top of file for link).

DOWNLOAD

The latest version can be found at http://phpservermon.neanderthal-technology.com/. You can also clone the git repo at http://github.com/dopeh/phpservermon.

REQUIREMENTS

• PHP 5
• PHP packages: cURL
• MySQL Database
• FTP access

INSTALL

By default the PHP Server Monitor does not come with any security methods. After uploading these files to your public html folder these will be visible to everyone on the web. It is recommended to put a password on this folder to prevent other people from playing with your tool. An example .htaccess login script can be found in the example/ dir. To create your own username and password for the .htpasswd file, see http://www.htaccesstools.com/htpasswd-generator/

1. Configuration

Rename the config.inc.php.sample file to config.inc.php, then open the config.inc.php file with a plain text editor such as Notepad. The first thing to do now in order to get started, is to get your database login information right. The information is stored using php's define() function. To change these values correctly, only update the second parameter of the function. For example:

 define('SM_DB_USER', 'db_user');

To change your username you should ONLY change the 'db_user' part. Do NOT remove the quotes aroundyour username as that will result in an error.

2. Upload files

The next step is to get your files onto your webserver where you can reach them. You can rename the folder of the server monitor without trouble, but if you change the structure please make sure to update the settings in the config.php file.

3. Run install.php

Once your database login information is correct, you can run the install.php script located in the root dir. This script will create all the database tables you will need. After running the install.php script you can remove it.

4. Configure your installation

Open the main page of the server monitor, by simply calling index.php. In the menu on the top find "config", it will open a page where you can change the necessary information for your tool.

5. [optional] Add a cronjob

In order to keep the server monitor up to date, the monitor.php file has to run regularly. If you're running this on a linux machine, the easiest way is to add a cronjob. If it is your own server or you have shell access and permission to open the crontab, locate the "crontab" file (usually in /etc/crontab, but depends on distro). Open the file (vi /etc/crontab), and add the following (change the paths to match your installation directories) to run it every 15 minutes:

 */15 * * * * root /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/phpservermon/cron/status.cron.php

As you can see, this line will run the status.cron.php script every 15 minutes. Change the line to suit your needs. If you do not have shell access, ask your webhosting to set it up for you.

6. Voila!

CUSTOMIZING

Language

The server monitor uses language files. That means that any regular text you see on the screen can easily be changed without having to digg through the code. These language files are stored in the directory "lang". The language that's being used by the monitor is defined in the config table. If you like you can make changes to the language file or even add a new one.

Changing the email or text message

Open the language file that corresponds to the selected language (default is English ("en.lang.php")). Scroll all the way to the bottom until you spot this line:

 'notifications' => array(

After that you'll see the lines that hold the notification messages. For example:

 'off_sms' => 'Server \'%LABEL%\' is DOWN: ip=%IP%, port=%PORT%. Error=%ERROR%',

The first part of this line, 'off_sms', is the name of the notification. You should not change this. The second part is the actual message. There are a few variables you can use in your message:

* %LABEL%				The name of the server
* %IP%					The ip of the server
* %PORT%				The port of the server
* %ERROR%				This one only works for the off_* messages and contains the error returned by the
							monitor

Adding a new language

It's not the easiest thing to add a new language to the monitor, but if you can spare a few minutes of your time to send in a translation, it can be added to a future release.

• Create a new file in the directory "lang" named "mylanguage.lang.php".
• Copy the contents of the file "en.lang.php" to your new file.
• Translate the English stuff to your own language.
• Send a copy to pep[at]neanderthal-technology.com so I can add it to the next release :)
• Or, send me a pull request on github.

CREDITS

• classes/phpmailer.class.php - Brent R. Matzelle
• German translation - Brunbaur Herbert
• French translation - David Ribeiro
• Korean translation - Ik-Jun

License

PHP Server Monitor is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

PHP Server Monitor is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with PHP Server Monitor. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.