website-poller - Site down? Get notified!

A situation you probably don't want to experience by Sean MacEntee (CC BY)

A couple of days ago we noticed a certain service of our co-op was down. It would have been nice to know about this earlier. That got us thinking, wouldn't it be nice if we had some kind of a poller. Even better, wouldn't it be nice if we got notifications on our desktop when some service fails to respond? Ergo website-poller was born.

website-poller is a simple Python script you are supposed to attach to your crontab. Set it to poll once per hour or so. If/when a service goes down, a notification will pop up. We support Ubuntu (other Linuxes might work too) and OS X (Growl) at the moment.

It might be nice to grow this into something bigger (get email, stats etc.). Even in its current state the script might be useful for some. Let us know if you have any ideas for further development.