by Jamie Bailey
If you are using one or more Raspberry Pis to run a dedicated task (such as monitoring who's at home or the weather or your beer fridge), you need those processes to run uninterrupted. A task that exits unexpectedly may need your immediate attention to avoid lost data, project delays, or a system failure. It is impractical to manually babysit a bunch of Pis to make sure everything keeps running. A better way to ensure continuous operation is to be alerted when a process exits and be able to pull up a single dashboard at anytime to see the status of every important process running on every one of your deployed Pis. If your Pi is running headless, having the IP address of that Pi in the same dashboard will also come in handy.
In this tutorial, we will use a couple of simple scripts to:
- create a web-based dashboard that monitors the status of multiple processes and IP addresses of each device
- configure our Pi to launch the dedicated process and its monitor on boot
- create an email/SMS notification when a process exits