A Basic Monitoring Engine in PHP - Sample ServiceLogger Process

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Here is a sample ServiceLogger process that sends an email to an on-call person when a service goes down:

class EmailMe_ServiceLogger implements

ServiceLogger {
public function log_service_event(ServiceCheck

$service)
{
if($service->current_status ==

ServiceCheck::FAILURE) {
$message = "Problem with

{$service->description()}\r\n";
mail('oncall@example.com', 'Service Event',

$message);
if($service->consecutive_failures() > 5) {
mail('oncall_backup@example.com', 'Service

Event', $message);
}
}
}
public function log_current_status(ServiceCheck

$service)
{
return;
}
}

If the failure persists beyond the fifth time, the process also sends a message to a backup address. It does not implement a meaningful log_current_status() method.

You implement a ServiceLogger process that writes to the PHP error log whenever a service changes status as follows:

class ErrorLog_ServiceLogger implements

ServiceLogger {
public function log_service_event(ServiceCheck

$service)
{
if($service->current_status() !==

$service->previous_status()) {
if($service->current_status() ===

ServiceCheck::FAILURE) {
$status = 'DOWN';
}
else {
$status = 'UP';
}
error_log("{$service->description()} changed

status to $status");
}
}
public function log_current_status(ServiceCheck

$service)
{
error_log("{$service->description()}: $status");
}
}

The log_current_status() method means that if the process is sent a SIGUSR1 signal, it dumps the complete current status to your PHP error log.

The engine takes a configuration file like the following:

<config>
<loggers>
<logger>
<id>errorlog</id>
<class>ErrorLog_ServiceLogger</class>
</logger>
<logger>
<id>emailme</id>
<class>EmailMe_ServiceLogger</class>
</logger>
</loggers>
<services>
<service>
<class>HTTP_ServiceCheck</class>
<params>
<description>OmniTI HTTP Check</description>
<url>http://www.omniti.com</url>
<timeout>30</timeout>
<frequency>900</frequency>
</params>
<loggers>
<logger>errorlog</logger>
<logger>emailme</logger>
</loggers>
</service>
<service>
<class>HTTP_ServiceCheck</class>
<params>
<description>Home Page HTTP Check</description>
<url>http://www.schlossnagle.org/~george</url>
<timeout>30</timeout>
<frequency>3600</frequency>
</params>
<loggers>
<logger>errorlog</logger>
</loggers>
</service>
</services>
</config>

When passed this XML file, the ServiceCheckRunner constructor instantiates a logger for each specified logger. Then it instantiates a ServiceCheck object for each specified service.

---

Note - The constructor uses the Reflection_Class class to introspect the service and logger classes before you try to instantiate them. This is not necessary, but it is a nice demonstration of the new Reflection API in PHP 5. In addition to classes, the Reflection API provides classes for introspecting almost any internal entity (class, method, or function) in PHP.

---

To use the engine you've built, you still need some wrapper code. The monitor should prohibit you from starting it twice—you don't need double messages for every event. It should also accept some options, including the following:

Option	Description
[-f]	A location for the engine's configuration file, which defaults to monitor.xml.
[-n]	The size of the child process pool the engine will allow, which defaults to 5.
[-d]	A flag to disable the engine from daemonizing. This is useful if you write a debugging ServiceLogger process that outputs information to stdout or stderr.

Here is the finalized monitor script, which parses options, guarantees exclusivity, and runs the service checks:

require_once "Service.inc";
require_once "Console/Getopt.php";
$shortoptions = "n:f:d";
$default_opts = array('n' => 5, 'f' =>

'monitor.xml');
$args = getOptions($default_opts, $shortoptions,

null);
$fp = fopen("/tmp/.lockfile", "a");
if(!$fp || !flock($fp, LOCK_EX | LOCK_NB)) {
fputs($stderr, "Failed to acquire lock\n");
exit;
}
if(!$args['d']) {
if(pcntl_fork()) {
exit;
}
posix_setsid();
if(pcntl_fork()) {
exit;
}
}
fwrite($fp, getmypid());
fflush($fp);
$engine = new ServiceCheckRunner($args['f'],

$args['n']);
$engine->loop();

Notice that this example uses the custom getOptions() function defined earlier in this chapter to make life simpler regarding parsing options.

After writing an appropriate configuration file, you can start the script as follows:

> ./monitor.php -f /etc/monitor.xml 

This daemonizes and continues monitoring until the machine is shut down or the script is killed.

This script is fairly complex, but there are still some easy improvements that are left as an exercise to the reader:

• Add a SIGHUP handler that reparses the configuration file so that you can change the configuration without restarting the server.

• Write a ServiceLogger that logs to a database for persistent data that can be queried.

• Write a Web front end to provide a nice GUI to the whole monitoring system.

Further Reading

There are not many resources for shell scripting in PHP. Perl has a much longer heritage of being a useful language for administrative tasks. Perl for Systems Administration by David N. Blank-Edelman is a nice text, and the syntax and feature similarity between Perl and PHP make it easy to port the book's Perl examples to PHP.

php|architect, an electronic (and now print as well) periodical, has a good article by Marco Tabini on building interactive terminal-based applications with PHP and the ncurses extension in Volume 1, Issue 12. php|architect is available online at http://www.phparch.com.

Although there is not space to cover it here, PHP-GTK is an interesting project aimed at writing GUI desktop applications in PHP, using the GTK graphics toolkit. Information on PHP-GTK is available at http://gtk.php.net.

A good open-source resource monitoring system is Nagios, available at http://nagios.org. The monitoring script presented in this chapter was inspired by Nagios and designed to allow authoring of all your tests in PHP in an integrated fashion. Also, having your core engine in PHP makes it easy to customize your front end. (Nagios is written in C and is CGI based, making customization difficult.)

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