# Easy server monitoring script

I manage or monitor a few servers, and it's a good idea to keep an eye on how they're holding up. The Linux uptime command is all I need - show me how long the server's been up (or if it's cycled recently - power hiccup?), and CPU load averages.

I just whipped up a dead-simple solution to let me embed the uptime reports from the servers into my retro homepage.

I'm quite sure there are better and/or more robust ways to do this, but this is what I came up with after maybe 2 minutes of thought.

On each of the servers, I added a shell script called "uptimewriter.sh" (in my ~/bin directory, so located at ~/bin/uptimewriter.sh). I made the file executable (chmod +x ~/bin/uptimewriter.sh) and used this script:

#!/bin/sh
echo "document.write('"uptime"');"

All it does is wrap the output of the uptime command in some javascript code to display the text when embedded on a web page. I then added it to the crontab on each of the servers, running every 15 minutes, and dumping the output into a file that will be visible via the webserver.

*/15 * * * * ~/bin/uptimewriter.sh > ~/public_html/uptime.js 2>&1

Every 15 minutes, the uptimewriter.sh script is run, and output into a javascript file that can be pulled to display on a web page.

When called from a web page, that will render the output of the uptime command, wrapped in a document.write() call as per the uptimewriter.sh script, displaying it nicely: