Question

Before I bang my head against all the issues myself I thought I’d run it by you guys and see if you could point me somewhere or pass along some tips.

I’m writing a really basic monitoring script to make sure some of my web applications are alive and answering. I’ll fire it off out of cron and send alert emails if there’s a problem.

So what I’m looking for are suggestions on what to watch out for. Grepping the output of wget will probably get me by, but I was wondering if there was a more programmatic way to get robust status information out of wget and my resulting web page.

This is a general kind of question, I’m just looking for tips from anybody who happens to have done this kind of thing before.

Answer 1

Check the exit code,

wget --timeout=10 --whatever http://example.com/mypage
if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
    there's a pproblem, mail logs, send sms, etc.
fi