Over the years, I’ve faced many issues where the server is down and the client lets us know. I think many other developers like me have faced similar problems. It doesn’t look good on the software company and developers’ part!

Being an iOS developer with no knowledge of scripting languages like Python, I’ve always felt tied down and I’ve never dared to try them. Yes, there are system monitoring tools available — both open source and paid and those can be used, but integrating another dependency in the system when I just want a simple Email and SMS alert to be sent to the team members when the server is down — I didn’t like that idea.

I have a Mac mini in my home which is on 24/7 with a stable internet connection, so I thought — why not use it to ping my project’s server every few minutes or an hour and check its status? I decided to sit down and learn a few chunks from here and there to just be able to write the script and run it in cron to alert me when the server goes down.

I decided to include three things:

• Send all the teammates (including the Project Manager) an email alert with details of when my script is unable to ping the server.
• Send the project manager and team lead an SMS alert.
• Alert me with sound when it is night time (for experimental purposes).

As I know very little about the language, I decided to take it one step at a time.

#data-science #programming #web-development #python