Using Status.Net to Monitor Your Server

Journalist Nathan Willis published an article on how to use Status.Net to keep informed about how your server is functioning. This is useful for local servers and for enterprise users managing hundreds to a thousands of servers. Willis states:
There are several different ways you can make use of a microblogging service to keep an eye on your server (or, for that matter, desktop machine), depending on what kinds of message you want to receive. You can tail log files and repeat the output in a feed, run a periodic cron job to collect statistics and send out the results as a form of "heartbeat monitor," or have batch processes send notifications when they complete. You can even configure existing open source monitoring services to use the service directly, or through email- or SMS-gateways.
Willis also notes that its wise to use Status.Net for private instances because you "also do not have to worry about a private StatusNet instance going down suddenly if Ashton Kutcher gets arrested, and in practice the public services like Identi.ca have not suffered from the "fail whale" outages that plague Twitter on a regular basis."

What is cool about this article are the code examples. Willis shows how easy it is to do some automated messaging. This provides a jump-off for others to script out other solutions. If you have a script, please do share with all on your Status.Net accounts, our wiki (http://status.net/wiki) or via the comments on this blog post.