cmw / tiny_mon

Website Acceptance Monitoring

TinyMon - Website Acceptance Monitoring

TinyMon is a small tool to automatically and periodically monitor that features of your website are still working. It basically emulates a browser and does health checks composed of steps, like a normal user would do. The steps are easily defined and configured over a nice user interface. Internally, the wonderful Webrat framework is used, so the engine is powerful and well tested.

Use cases

• Use TinyMon to monitor if your on-site search feature is working as expected
• Fill in login forms and log in with a test account
• Do a complete transaction for your online shop
• Monitor your signup process (e.g. sign up a user, click activation link, check welcome page etc.)

Features

• Supports all web technologies including HTML5 and Javascript
• Available in two languages: English and German
• Automatically updated overview
• Overview of recent activity
• Test duration graph
• Log output
• Email on failure
• Retry 3 times on failure to avoid false negatives
• Extreme Feedback Device-like overview
• Choose check interval per health check (every minute to once a day)
• Checks IMAP email inboxes (important for monitoring signup processes)
• Login mechanism
• Group health checks in accounts
• Assign any number of users to any number of accounts
• Prowl notifications
• Create similar health checks from templates
• Even create your own flexible health check templates with a nice user interface
• Import health checks from CSV files
• Start as many workers as you want when using Resque
• Bulk update health checks
• Mark your check runs with the currently deployed revision to quickly identify bad deployments

Missing Stuff

• Configuration has to be done by hand
• Some step types might be missing
• Alerts other than by email and Prowl (e.g. SMS)
• Nice way of distributing the application
• Nice way to setup the database
• Nice way of starting all needed processes

Installation

Clone the repository. Then run

bundle install
rake db:create:all
rake db:migrate

Running

This is pre-alpha. So there you need to start the processes manually. Start the server like any Rails application:

rails server -e production

Start the background checker process with

RAILS_ENV=production script/scheduler

Upgrading

Version 0.1.0 to 0.2.0

Version 0.2.0 added Javascript support via Capybara + PhantomJS. In addition to the usual upgrading, do the following steps.

• Make sure you run Ruby 1.9.3
• Install PhantomJS
• You may uninstall wkhtmltoimage
• Migrate the YAML columns in the database so that special characters are UTF-8. These columns are steps.data, health_check_template_steps.step_data_hash, config_options.value, check_runs.log

Differences in behavior:

• PhantomJS complains about ambiguities when finding elements, so these must be resolved in the steps
• Link texts should not include HTML tags anymore
• Check runs take about twice the time
• Capybara expects correct CSS selector syntax

Contributing

Do the Github dance. That means fork the project, make your changes, and send me a pull request.

About

TinyMon was written by Thomas Kadauke.

Getting it, License and Patches

Get the complete source code through github.com/tkadauke/tiny_mon. For installation instructions, see above. License is MIT. That means that you can do whatever you want with the software, as long as the copyright statement stays intact. Please be a kind open source citizen, and give back your patches and extensions. Just fork the code on Github, and after you’re done, send us a pull request. Thanks for your help!