I’ve just released WebPing under a GPL license. It’s available right now on a GitHub repository  .

WebPing is a script I started to work on in 2009 while working at EDF . Back then, I needed a monitoring tool to keep an eye on the 80+ Plone instances that my team managed. For several corporate reasons, I wasn’t allowed to use a proper monitoring tool like Munin or Nagios . So I created a small script to fill this need. That’s how WebPing came to be.

WebPing is just a stupid Python script that is designed to be ticked regularly by a cron job. It try to fetch a list of URLs and store response times in an SQLite database. Then it create a static HTML report you’re free to serve with any HTTP server (an example Apache configuration is provided). The configuration of WebPing and the list of URLs it monitor is stored in a YAML file.

The produced HTML report use the Flot jQuery plugin to render graphs. Here is how the dashboard looks like:

Finally, WebPing is able to send reports and alerts by emails. Here is how a mail alert looks like:

Since I created WebPing, I found several other projects more or less developed around the same idea. See Kong , which is based on Django and Twill , a web-oriented DSL . Another project I spotted after the facts was multi-mechanize . Like Kong, it’s written in Python. But I never played with one or the other.