Post your most wanted plugins here and we’ll help organize where development is happening!

Here are some of the plugins we’ve gotten requests for since launching:

Monitor Multiple URLS – a plugin that can take in a list of URLs and monitor each one, possibly reporting back data on each

Monitor a Single Mongrel – the mongrel monitor plugin right now takes in a directory like /etc/mongrel_cluster and checks every conf and yml file, for mongrel configurations—this plugin would monitor just a single .conf file for the mongrel

Any more? Comments wanted!

Once I get an account I’ll probably do some plugins for different things. Off the top of my head maybe…

1. SNMP for collecting data from routers and access points.
2. Email server usage and Spam Stats.

So, stupid question here, but I am interested in writing plug-ins for Scout. I’ve written a really simple one and was starting on a second, I have a few other ideas that I’d like to move on to from there. One problem—I can only run three plug-ins under the free account. Now, I’m currently monitoring my home server, so it doesn’t really make much sense to pay $14 per month just to have some fun developing in Ruby and then testing what I put together, but I’d like to both monitor critical stats (disk space, etc.) and run the plug-ins that I’ve written to see how they work over time, etc. Is there going to be an option for registered developers to run additional plugins? You can see http://www.bluezucchini.com/scoutplugins for what I’ve written so far and I’ll post the next one when I finish. Thanks in advance. mark.

mark,

We don’t have a developer plan so far, but if you are a developer, shoot us an email: support at highgroove dot com and I’m sure we’ll set something up.

What about an interface to monit? The monit folk recently released their “m|monit” project (http://tildeslash.com/mmonit/).

Scout looks a heck of a lot cooler, has a great, defined plug-in interface, is much further along, and doesn’t require another process running (should monit monitor m|monit, too??)—in short, it seems like a far superior solution.

What about a plugin that lets you interface with the monit process already running on our servers? I see the plugin library already has a simple script to restart mongrel. But the monit process monitoring/restarting syntax is significantly more advanced: why re-invent the wheel?

It could start out simply enough: interrogate the monit conf file and execute commands held within, but seems a short hop to then replace all that m|monit does.

Interested in the everyone’s thoughts!!

Thanks,

—
Matt

Matt—

I haven’t checked out m|monit, but I actually do use monit to keep all the components running for Scout. Unfortunately though, getting an e-mail about a process ballooning in memory and then restarting doesn’t really help me diagnose why it did it in the first place, or what was going on at the time. I’m with you (and probably preaching to the choir about how Scout helps to alleviate this problem by showing you what other factors could have contributed to this), though!

And having a scout plugin that works in conjunction with monit is a fantastic idea. Brilliant, even.

I am testing a new plugin called, simply enough: Keep Process Running and it couldn’t be simpler. I think interrogating the monit file is an awesome idea too.

Keep ‘em coming! Thanks for the feedback!