Flutterby™! : email uptime monitoring 2007-09-13 22:37:10.973925+00

email uptime monitoring

2007-09-13 22:37:10.973925+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

So I was gonna just slap a little Perl together, but as usual politics looks like it's interfering: Anyone got a suggestion for something that'll monitor email latency and availability? Specifically I want to have something that'll send to SMTP and check an IMAP account (probably POP3, too, but those of us who use POP3 on that server are having no problems, so verifying IMAP is the critical part), and probably send outbound SMTP and check that mail somewhere else.

If I'm not going to write and run this myself I want a hosted solution that I can send those who are worrying about this off after so that I don't have to manage it.

Maybe nagios? We use it for monitoring stuff at The Office (although I wasn't the one to install it and I'm not even sure which machine it's running on).

Nagios can be a bit of a bear to set up; I'd also be a bit apprehensive (superstitious?) about it continuing to work without some stroking from time to time.

There are some free things (like Zenoss) that wrap Nagios and may make it easier to manage; that might be worth investigating.

For what you're describing, assuming it isn't going to grow more functions as time goes on, and that it's okay for it to be on the "ain't purty but works" end of the spectrum, the Perl + cron + an afternoon approach would probably be the way I'd personally go.

Yeah, John, that's why I either wanted something hosted ("No, you give 'em your credit card number") or to write it myself, because it's a simple enough problem that reading the docs to set something else up was going to take as long as writing it.