Earlier we took Pingdom into use and published Pingdom default status page (blog post). Very soon we realized it's not good enough and we want to share more information on the same place. Also, Pingdom wasn't willing to improve public status pages, so we decided to make our own.
Feel free to! All code provided by us is licensed with BSD license. See LICENSE.md for more information. Some parts have other licenses, MIT and Apache license and CC (commercial usage allowed).
Our public status information server runs in Amazon EC2 - there's no point on running it on our own network. It's in our domain, but domain servers are easy to replicate. Small python script posts network map from our internal statistics server to public one. Similarly RT runs on separate server. RT server sends statistics regularly with backend/fetch_rt.py. Both network map and RT statistics come in through upload.php. Public server fetches Pingdom statistics directly. That's the only time critical page - if everything something is broken on our end, network map and RT statistics are not working, but services status page shows up-to-date information.
Basic documentation:
See also docs/ directory for more information.
Configure Pingdom. Get API key from Pingdom control panel.
Install following packages: python, highlight, collectd, redis, python-imaging, python-redis, python-dateutil, python-twitter, apache2, libapache2-mod-php5, trimage, yui-compressor, rrdtool, python-rrdtool and make. In Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python-imaging collectd python python-redis redis-server python-dateutil highlight python-twitter apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 yui-compressor make trimage rrdtool python-rrdtool
Configure redis to offer unix socket at /home/redis/redis.sock (or change lib/redis.php and backend/ to use TCP connection instead).
Configure apache2:
sudo a2enmod php5 rewrite headers deflate expires
Install pecl_http: http://pecl.php.net/package/pecl_http
sudo pecl install pecl_http
Change PHP session handler to redis (it'll not work with default settings). In Debian/Ubuntu, /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini:
session.save_handler = redis
session.save_path = "tcp://localhost:6379?prefix=phpsession:&timeout=2"
- Whenever you make changes, run make on top directory to generate minified versions and to update application cache manifest timestamp
- Modify pages/main.php (for example company name)
- Modify pages/what.php to match with your ideologies and technologies used.
- Feel free to change favicon.ico - by default it's Futurice company logo
- Move upload_settings.php.sample to upload_settings.php. Change $password, and add same password to backend settings.
- 404.html, 500.html, index.php, grapher/inc/html.inc.php: change google analytics tracking code to yours (or just remove it).
- Change domain name, whenever it's not dynamically generated: use "grep status.futurice.com * -R" to find occurances.
- Optional: add carousel (on "What?" page) images to img/carousel/. See img/carousel/README.md for more information.
For security reasons, it might be good idea to run RT on separate server.
- Install and configure RT (if you want to use "IT tickets" page)
- Copy backend/rt_settings.py.example to your RT server. Rename it to rt_settings.py and configure relevant variables
- Copy backend/fetch_rt.py to your RT server. Add it to crontab.
- Configure network weathermap
- For output image, something like 900x950px is good.
- backend/monitor_and_upload_file.py handles file upload, if network weathermap runs on separate server (recommended).
It's recommended to run printer status update from separate server - server running public status pages shouldn't have access to printers at all.
- Enable SNMP on your printers. Some printer drivers use SNMP too - changing community might break something.
- Don't enable write access for this script.
- printer_status.py fetches printer status using SNMP. Configure printer_settings.py.sample. Requires net-snmp package.
- Don't run any of the scripts under root
- Move pingdom_settings.py.example to backend/pingdom_settings.py and configure relevant variables.
- Add fetch_pingdom.py to crontab (suggestion: every minute - fetches only current statuses every minute, other details less often)
- Add fetch_twitter.py to crontab. First argument is your twitter username. (suggestion: once per few minutes)
- Add frontpage_json.py to crontab (suggestion: every minute)
- Add miscstats_json.py to crontab (suggestion: every minute)
- Add printer_graphs.py to crontab (suggestion: every minute)
This is what we have in crontab for regular user owning all files under /var/www:
* * * * * cd /var/www/backend; python fetch_pingdom.py
* * * * * cd /var/www/backend; python frontpage_json.py; python miscstats_json.py; python printer_graphs.py; cd sauna; python gen.py
*/3 * * * * cd /var/www/backend; python fetch_twitter.py futurice
This list is just some useful documents and links used while creating this services.