Quick and Dirty Server Monitoring with Python

Sometimes you just need a quick and dirty script for monitoring servers to see if they are up. I wrote the following python script and have it running from cron so that it will notify me via SMS when a server's service isn't responding. The list of hosts is in a python dictionary with the key being the hostname or ip to monitor and the value being a list of service ports to check. If a host/port doesn't respond, it emails to the Sprint messaging service which appears on my phone. Any provider that has an email to SMS gateway should work. It isn't anywhere near a full fledged monitoring system but works well enough.




#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
monitor script
"""
import os, sys, socket, smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

def checkServer( host, port ):
    serverSocket = socket.socket()
    serverSocket.settimeout(3)
    try:
        serverSocket.connect((host, port))
    except socket.error:
        return 1

hosts={
    'gw.domain.com':[ 25, 80, 110, 143, 524, 1677 ],
    'www.domain.com':[ 80 ],
    'server.domain.com': [ 524 ]
    }

content=''

for host in hosts:
    for port in hosts[host]:
        status=checkServer( host, port )
        if status:
            content+=' Port %s on %s is down.\n' % ( port, host )

if content:
    msg = MIMEText(content)
    msg['Subject'] = 'Monitor'
    msg['From'] = 'user@domain.com'
    msg['To'] = 'xxxxxxxxxx@messaging.sprintpcs.com'

    s = smtplib.SMTP('mx.messaging.sprintpcs.com', 25)
    s.sendmail('monitor@domain.com', 'xxxxxxxxxx@messaging.sprintpcs.com', msg.as_string())
    s.quit()