Logging

Loggers are used by SimpleMonitor to record the state of all monitors after each interval.

The types of loggers are:

db: Records the result of every monitor, every iteration (maintaining a history) in a SQLite database.
dbstatus: Records a snapshot of the current state of every monitor in a SQLite database.
logfile: Records a logfile of the result of every monitor, or only the monitors which failed. Each line is preceeded by the current UNIX timestamp.
html: Writes an HTML file showing the status of all monitors (including remote ones).
network: Sends status of all monitors to a remote host.
seq: Sends status of all monitors to a seq log server
json: Writes a JSON file describing the state of all the monitors
mqtt: Send monitor state via MQTT

Defining a logger

The section name should be the name of your logger. This is the name you should give in the “loggers” setting in the “reporting” section of the configuration. All loggers take these two parameters.

setting	description	required	default
type	the type of logger to create. Choose one of the five in the list above.	yes
depend	lists (comma-separated, no spaces) the names of the monitors this logger depends on. Use this if the database file lives over the network. If a monitor it depends on fails, no attempt will be made to update the database.	no
groups	comma-separated list of monitor groups this logger should operate for. Use `_all` to match all groups.	no	“default”
tz	The timezone the logger should convert date/times to.	no	UTC

db and dbstatus loggers

setting	description	required	default
path	the path/filename of the SQLite database file. You should initialise the schema of this file using the monitor.sql file in the distribution. You can use the same database file for many loggers.	yes

logfile loggers

setting	description	required	default
filename	the filename to write to. Rotating this file underneath SimpleMonitor will likely result in breakage (this will be addressed later).	yes
buffered	set to 1 if you aren’t going to watch the logfile in real time. If you want to watch it with something like tail -f then set this to 0.	no	1
only_failures	set to 1 if you only want failures to be written to the file.	no	0
dateformat	The date format to write for log lines. Supported values are “timestamp” (UNIX timestamp) or “iso8601” (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS).	no	timestamp

html loggers

setting	description	required	default
source_folder	the folder in which all the needed files live. You only need this if you’re customising the files	no	“html” in the distribution
folder	the folder in which to write the file(s). Must already exist.	yes
filename	the filename to write out. The file will be updated once per interval (as defined in the main configuration). Relative to the folder.	yes
upload_command	a command to run to e.g. upload the generated files to another location	no
copy_resources	set to 0 if simplemonitor should not copy needed supporting files (e.g. CSS) to the output folder	no	1
map	set to 1 to replace the table with a map. Set the “gps” property on your monitors.	no	0
map_start	comma-separated latitude, longitude, zoom level for the initial map view. Try something like 10-15 for the map view to start	yes
map_token	an API token for mapbox.com in order to make the map work. Don’t commit it to a public repo	yes

The supplied template includes JavaScript to notify you if the page either doesn’t auto-refresh, or if SimpleMonitor has stopped updating it. This requires your machine running SimpleMonitor and the machine you are browsing from to agree on what the time is (timezone doesn’t matter)! The template is written using Jinja2.

You can use the upload_command setting to specify a command to push the generated files to another location (e.g. a web server, an S3 bucket etc). I’d suggest putting the commands in a script and just specifying that script as the value for this setting.

seq logger

This logger is used to send status reports of all monitors to a seq log server. The logger must be configured with the seq endpoint parameter, for example http://10.0.0.100:5341/api/events/raw

setting	description	required	default
endpoint	Full URI for the endoint on the seq server (e.g. http://localhost:5341/api/events/seq)	yes

From their website, ‘Seq creates the visibility you need to quickly identify and diagnose problems in complex applications and microservices’. See https://datalust.co for more information on Seq

network logger

This logger is used to send status reports of all monitors to a remote instance. The remote instance must be configured to listen for connections. The key parameter is a shared secret used to generate a hash of the network traffic so the receiving instance knows to trust the data. (Note that the traffic is not encrypted, just given a hash.)

setting	description	required
host	the remote host to send to.	yes
port	the port on the remote host to connect to.	yes
key	shared secret to protect communications	yes

json logger

setting	description	required	default
filename	the path of the JSON file to write.	yes

mqtt logger

setting	description	required	default
host	The host to connect to	yes
port	The port to connect on	no	1883
hass	Specific configuration for Home Assistant MQTT discovery	no	false
topic	The topic to post to	no	`simplemonitor` (`homeassistant/binary_sensor` if hass is set)
username	The username to use	no
password	The password to use	no

See https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/mqtt/discovery/ for more information on HASS/

Simplemonitor

A Python-based network and host monitor