We wanted to monitor the reachability and responsiveness of our clients' websites. Obviously, you want to do this from multiple points and networks throughout the Internet. So what did we do?

We arranged for shell accounts with Perl, DBI for mySQL, and cron access. Then, every 15 minutes, the cron job measures ping times, packet loss, and the route. This data is then stored in a database on one of our servers locally. We also receive emailed alerts for high packet loss or total outage.

With that data and GD::Graph, we make some nice pretty graphs for our clients to see things like how hosting their website over that internal 64k ISDN line is a Bad Idea.

In reply to Distributed network monitor by comatose

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.