jeffam / mxflow

Simple round-trip email monitoring

mxflow

Simple round-trip email monitoring

About

mxflow is a free mail server monitor that periodically sends email messages to a test mailbox on your server. If that message isn't delivered back within a configurable amount of time, you'll receive an alert.

mxflow runs on App Engine and can be run for free without billing enabled, when using the default settings and monitoring a single server.

Setup

1. Create a new App Engine project. Note the Project ID (AKA App ID).
2. Download a copy of this application.
3. Adjust the settings:
   • In app.yaml, set application: <your app id>
   • Create a file called config.ini and add one or more servers to monitor. See example.config.ini for more info.
   • Optionally adjust the settings in cron.yaml. Note that the default values are set to keep the application under the billing limits. If you increase the /probesend task to a level where it sends more than 100 messages a day, you'll hit the free quota and the probes will stop working. Also note that alert emails count toward the quota. See the mail quota info for details.
4. Add a mailbox on your mail server and configure it to forward mail to the receiving email for your App Engine instance. The receiving email looks like this: [e-mail]
5. Deploy the application to App Engine. This is left as an exercise for the reader, although I'm sure that a tutorial would be welcome.

Changelog

v1.0.0 - 2014-11-25

• Initial version

Contributing

Pull requests for fixes and new features are welcome. This is my first useful Python application, so feel free to set me straight where necessary!

Plans/Ideas

• Fix time displays to use local time zone
• Add a new cron task (and setting?) to truncate the probe history
• Add charts showing round-trip performance over time
• Save the server configuration in the datastore and allow it to be modified without re-deploying the app
• Consider a switch from cron to the task queue api for testing of failed probes