PHP Web server monitor

With this simple PHP script, you’ll be able to monitor the availability of Web servers. Write a list of URLs to monitor and run the script from cron. If a site becomes unavailable, monitor PHP script will generate alert and send e-mail to the default e-mail address. Monitor script is also able to send e-mail message to the various e-mail address (e-mail address per URL).

<?
// check list of URLs (select URLs with small traffic - static content)
url_test('http://www.redips.net/my/img/b.gif');
url_test('http://raspored.hrt.hr/b.gif');

/**
 * function checks Web server and sends an e-mail if there is a problem
 * email_admin has a default value and function can be called with or without e-mail address
 * script implies that the Web server does not work if there is no response within 10 seconds
 *
 * @param string $url          URL that must be checked
 * @param string $email_admin  if there is a problem send e-mail notification to this address
 */
function url_test($url, $email_admin='your@email.address'){
	// set timeout
	$timeout = 10;
	// init url session and set curl options
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
	$http_respond = curl_exec($ch); // execute http request
	// remove all html tags from the http response
	$http_respond = trim(strip_tags($http_respond));
	// get status from the http response
	$http_code = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
	// returned http code should be 200 otherwise there is a problem
	if ($http_code != 200){
		// prepare tested server name (component parameter added in PHP 5.1.2)
		$http_server = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST);
		// and who was tester
    $hostname = trim(`/bin/hostname`);
		// get an error message from the URL request
		$http_error = trim(curl_error($ch));
		// prepare e-mail message
		$email_message = "TEST URL: $url";
		if ($http_code)    $email_message .= "\n\nHTTP CODE: $http_code";
		if ($http_respond) $email_message .= "\n\nHTTP RESPOND:\n$http_respond";
		if ($http_error)   $email_message .= "\n\nHTTP ERROR:\n$http_error";
		// prepare e-mail header
		$email_header = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"iso-8859-2\"\n".
		                "Subject: http://$http_server problem!\n".
		                "From: monitor@$hostname\n".
		                "X-Priority: 1\n".
		                "Priority: Urgent\n".
		                "Importance: high";
		// send e-mail message
		error_log($email_message, 1, $email_admin, $email_header);
	}
	// close url session
	curl_close($ch);
}
?>

I run monitor script every five minutes and here is my cron entry:

# PHP Web server monitor
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /usr/local/scripts/monitor.php

Script was and is very useful for me, and I hope it will be for you.

Categories PHP

7 thoughts on “PHP Web server monitor”

  1. Thanks, just what I needed!

    I did not want something complicated and this does exactly what it has to do. A nice addition of the script might be that repeat messages are suppressed. But then again, that’s only needed if you’re website is down for a long time ;-)

  2. I have this monitor script in production and if a Web site is down for an hour, then I will receive about 12 mail notifications (cron runs it every 5 minutes). Yes, it’s annoying but it does the job. On the other hand if you want to suppress repeated messages, then PHP code will grow and this will no longer be a simple PHP monitor …
    Anyway, thank you for the comment.
    :)

  3. Thanks for the script. Any idea how one could monitor other ports other than 80? I have been having trouble with dns on one machine. I have filed a support ticket but in the meantime I would like to get it fixed. Monitoring of email smtp service and dns would be great. It would somehow just have to open a connection rather than follow all the way through.

    Thank you
    KM

  4. Hmm, you will have to start simple communication with the monitored service – something like “hello” for the smtp. If you have installed PERL, then the mon (Service Monitoring Daemon) will be excellent choice. I used it for LDAP and it works just fine. Please see the huge list of services that can be monitored with mon package.

  5. I am developing a script for my server which would check ports 80, 443, 22 and 25. however, with the above script I can only monitor ports 80 and (with some minor modifications also) 443. I tried using fsockopen for checking port 22 and 25. Can anyone please tell me what would be the benefit of using curl or should I only use fsockopen for all ports.

  6. @Salman – This script is primarily created for testing http servers. In case of error it will not only alert problem but it will send useful info as well (http code, respond and error decription). fsockopen is a low level function and you will need a little more PHP code to achieve functionality of curl (in case of testing http servers). Anyway, if you only need to test if some port is dead or alive, fsockopen will be just fine. Any other comment is more then welcome.

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