SPMon: Service Provider Monitoring

What is it?

SPMon is a collection of simple scripts that are meant to be plugged in various monitoring systems to query service provides for some data.

For example, if you use an Internet service provider, pay for it and want to collect account balance stats on regular basis, you'd most likely want to query programmatically from your monitoring system (for example, once per day) to check that your account balance approaches critical level that would mean termination of services and thus trouble.

Unfortunately, most service providers don't provide APIs to get interesting data from them - so we're most usually end up emulating a web browser that opens a log in page, enters credentials in some form, submits that form, clicks a few buttons around and then comes up with the data we want.

What can be monitored?

• Internet service providers
• Web hosting service providers
• Domain registrars
• Cell phone providers
• VOIP providers
• E-commerce payment systems
• Banking accounts
• ... etc

If provider uses pre-paid scheme, then SPMon scripts would usually return account balance (which usually decreases with time, as more and more services are rendered). If provider uses subscription services with per-period fee, then SPMon scripts would usually reports paid time left in currently paid period.

How to use it?

• Choose a directory in services/ directory by your service provider's hostname.

• Check README file in that directory or just script's sources for a list of parameters required for a given script.

• Pass required parameters (usually scripts require credentials to log in to service providers) as environment variables, i.e.:

  LOGIN=some-login PASSWORD=s0m3-p4ssw0rd ./monitor

• If everything's okay, script would output result at stdout.

• If you want to install a given script somewhere permanently, note that all scripts require "_spmon_lib" file with common functions and initializations. You have 2 options:

  • Either copy required script (services/xxx/monitor) and common functions file (services/_spmon_lib) in the same directory,
  • Or put common functions file somewhere in PATH (i.e. /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin, etc) where it can be found.

Philosophy

SPMon scripts are designed to be:

• Simple - most scripts consist of 5-6 lines of code and thus should be easy to understand, support and maintain.
• Minimalistic - most scripts "emulate" browser behavior when logging in to the provider's site and checking the requested data, but this emulation shouldn't be considered full and accurate. Throughout emulation of real human behavior is a fairly complex task and generally contradicts other goals of SPMon project.
• Portable - SPMon's scripts require only basic UNIX shell and some application (currently wget). It should be easy to run SPMon scripts in Linux, BSD and Windows systems.
• Work out of box (with no or minimal configuration).
• Easy to embed in most monitoring systems - most systems allow running external scripts that report values using stdout.
• Easy to reuse - several lines of code in every script clearly designate HTTP requests that are required to perform a task and thus these requests could be easily implemented in all possible languages.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.