The other day I decided wanted to be be alerted via SMS when Klaki or some of my other online endeavors malfunction. Partalistinn in particular has had a somewhat embarrassing tendency to go offline without me noticing, sometimes for days at a time...

The leading open-source solution to do this sort of thing is probably Nagios, although there are a few other open-source packages which claim to be "enterprise monitoring solutions"; Big Brother, Big Sister, it's been a popular problem to solve.

I'm picky though and I like reinventing the wheel.

All the existing solutions seemed like overkill to me; I only really want to monitor one or two servers at most. I wanted something simple, but still powerful enough to do dependency checking and not spam me with false alarms just because the network has a hiccup.

I also just felt like writing some code. :-)

So I wrote Yamon: Yet Another Monitoring script.

It's not too big, and not too small. It's just right.

I've now got it happily running on ohno.klaki.net. It sends me SMS alerts via. an e-mail to SMS gateway and so far seems to work pretty well.

Check it out!