Services status dashboard

Today, I was looking for an Open Source alternative to Pingdom as I needed something free, customizable, and lightweight. I love the GitHub’s Status Panel, unfortunately they didn’t open source it.

This kind of application is somewhat simple. You need a crawler, and few rules to know whether an application is alive or not. Additionally, you may want to store results in order to make graphs or calculate uptime average. Before writing such a tool myself, I tried to find existing projects on GitHub.

Good news! I found a nice project: Status Dashboard created by Olivier Bazoud. This project is simple to configure, you can use provided plugins (Twitter, IRC bot, History, …) or add your owns, and you can monitor various services (not only HTTP). If you don’t want to use the beautiful interface, then you’ll find a REST API as well.

Installation

Run npm install to setup the project and its dependencies, then add your own configuration in settings.js. Mine is:

// ...
settings["william"] = {
  services: [
    {
      name: "williamdurand.fr",
      label: "William Durand (blog)",
      check: "http",
      host: "williamdurand.fr",
      port: "80",
      path: "/",
      headers: {
        Host: "williamdurand.fr",
      },
    },
  ],
  plugins: {
    history: {
      enable: true,
      host: "127.0.0.1",
      port: 6379,
      namespace: "statusdashboard",
      options: {},
      client: true,
    },
  },
};

Then, start the server:

node server.js

Check the server is running by browsing http://127.0.0.1:8080/ or by querying the API:

> curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/services
{"lastupdate":"Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:29:11 GMT","services":[{"name":"williamdurand.fr","label":"William Durand (blog)","status":"up","statusCode":200,"message":""}],"summarize":{"lastupdate":"Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:29:11 GMT","up":1,"critical":0,"down":0,"unknown":0}}

The project is available at: https://github.com/obazoud/statusdashboard.