I’ve been using Nagios to monitor servers and devices for years now. Lately as an exercise to learn more about nagios I installed a private instance that I use to monitor everything I can think of – from my personal servers to the number of hours we watch TV.
A nice use I found is to monitor the number of followers my twitter bots and personal account have. For that I wrote a custom plugin, available in my small repository of plugins at: https://github.com/silviuvulcan/nagios-plugins
The plugin pulls the number from the public site – no API access required. Since the data is not changing frequently you could use a custom setting to check less often. My entry looks like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | define host{ use linux-server host_name twitter alias twitter address twitter.com } define service{ use local-service,graphed-service ; Name of service template to use host_name twitter service_description Twitter followers: @rtjolla normal_check_interval 60 ; check hourly check_command check_twitterfollowers!rtjolla } |
This creates a host named twitter, and graphs (provided you have nagiosgrapher up and running) the number of followers. Of course you have to install the plugin and create a custom command for it. Mine looks like this:
1 2 3 4 | define command{ command_name check_twitterfollowers command_line $USER1$/check_twitterfollowers.sh -u $ARG1$ } |
Below is the code of the plugin if you are not interested in cloning the repo:
Twitter followers graphed by nagios sample
