SliceMonitor, a slicehost widget

Wednesday, 10th December 2008

I often find myself logging into my slicemanager just to check if it’s running OK and to view some basic stats such as my bandwidth usage. I used pingdom for a while to notify me about downtime, but since I’m a one man team running it it always received notifications when I knew it was down, so it didn’t really work out for me.

I noticed the Slicehost API a few weeks ago and creating a simple monitoring widget has been something that I’ve wanted to do ever since, so ladies and gentlemen - let me introduce you to SliceMonitor!

screenshot

SliceMonitor is a very simple and basic slice monitor that utilizes the Slicehost API to fetch some basic info about your slices such as bandwidth in & out, what IP address(es) it’s running on and what it’s current status is.

The big green indicator to the left turns orange whenever something is going on with the slice so you can quickly spot if something fishy is happening.

Of course, this is no replacement for any monitoring tool out there - it’s just something I felt was missing and threw together one night.

Versions

1.1.4 (download)

  • Fixed a bug where the widget would resize improperly
  • Fix for the widget not being able to load results again.
  • New spinner images
  • More detailed bandwidth usage
  • SliceMonitor is now on GitHub - http://github.com/luddep/SliceMonitor/tree/master

1.1.3

  • Fixed a nasty bug which made the widget unusable for some people.

1.1

  • Support for multiple slices
  • Reordering
  • Disabling / Enabling of slices to only see the ones you want

OS X Tiger

For now, only OS X Leopard is supported - I think I’ve narrowed the problem down, but it’s hard to test when I don’t have access to Tiger at the moment. I will try my best to fix it!

Requirements & Download

  • Dashboard and OS X Leopard is required to run SliceMonitor.
  • Download now!

52 comments

  1. 's gravatar 11th December 2008

    slicematt

    Awesome work thank you so much.

  2. 's gravatar 11th December 2008

    patroy

    Very nice! Do you plan on adding multi slice capabilities?

  3. 's gravatar 11th December 2008

    Ludwig Pettersson

    Matt, thank you!

    Patroy, yeah - I’ve already started sketching a bit on the execution, so it’ll definitely be added.

  4. 's gravatar 11th December 2008

    mdeering

    Nice! Looking forward to the mult-slice version.

  5. 's gravatar 11th December 2008

    Zviki

    Very Cool !!!!

  6. 's gravatar 11th December 2008

    janco

    for some reason I’m unable to get the widget show it’s back so I’m not able to configure it for my slice.I’m using a PowerBook G4

  7. 's gravatar 12th December 2008

    Dave

    Same with me, janco. I’m running a PowerBook G4 with Tiger 10.4.11

  8. 's gravatar 12th December 2008

    Patrick Berkeley

    This is pretty cool. It would be nice if you could see more detailed info, but maybe in/out is all the API make available right now. Anyway, thanks.

  9. 's gravatar 12th December 2008

    Ludwig Pettersson

    Yeah, I know about the bug when running it on Tiger - trying to figure out what part isn’t backwards compatible, but I’ll sort it out!

    Patrick, yeah - it’s a bit limited at the moment.

  10. 's gravatar 13th December 2008

    Jim Puls

    I installed this and tried it; when I enter my API key on the back of the widget, it correctly lists my slice, but when I click “Done”, nothing ever shows up on the front of the widget. Every time I hide and show Dashboard, the widget gets taller.

  11. 's gravatar 13th December 2008

    Ludwig Pettersson

    Whoa, Jim, that’s no good. I experienced something similiar early in development but thought that I had squashed that bug. Looking into it and seeing if I can replicate it.

    Does a reinstall / simply delete the widget and re-add it solve it?

  12. 's gravatar 13th December 2008

    Francis

    This works wonderfully! I’d love to see some swap/mem/cpu usage stats as well, but this is very nice to have as is!

  13. 's gravatar 14th December 2008

    Adam D

    I am having the same problem as Jim, nothing that appears on the reverse side shows up on the front side.

    Everytime I go into dashboard, it adds more space, making the widget taller and taller by 1 row. All while keeping a blank pane.

    Looks awesome though, I am @releod in #slicehost, so let me know if it gets fixed and I will try it out again.

  14. 's gravatar 14th December 2008

    Ryan Townsend

    Very smart, sexy interface - works fine for me. Props to the idea of swap/mem/cpu from Francis, would be useful for myself also.

  15. 's gravatar 15th December 2008

    Michael

    Very cool! Works great for me :)

  16. 's gravatar 15th December 2008

    Larry

    Ditto Adam D & Jim Puls

    Only 1 slice shows up out of 2 no matter what order they are on the back only the 256 slice shows up. The growing window thing is the same however.

  17. 's gravatar 15th December 2008

    Wagner Sartori Junior

    What do you think in release the source? I’d like to rewrite with linode API as I have servers in both.

  18. 's gravatar 15th December 2008

    Chris Wubbels

    Got the widget. Thanks!

  19. 's gravatar 17th December 2008

    Ludwig Pettersson

    So, now the strange bug that affected some users should now be fixed - thanks for the help debugging it everyone!

    Wagner, yeah - we’ll see, I’ve got to work a little bit more on it before I dare open source it. But if you’d like, you can now just roam through it just by exploring it - it’s all just javascript, css & html files after all.

  20. 's gravatar 18th December 2008

    Huy

    Cool tool, it’d be awesome if it included some memory/swap usage stats too.

    Thanks for everything

  21. 's gravatar 18th December 2008

    Charlie

    I love this widget, thanks for putting it together.

    One thing though. When I am on my laptop I am not always online, and in these situations the widget automatically flips over and gives a timeout error message. I find this a bit distracting for a widget that should really just sit there quietly. Any chance you could stop it doing that and maybe add a “Last updated:” timestamp instead. i.e. make it fail silently and resume checking when I am online again. Thanks again.

  22. 's gravatar 27th December 2008

    Julian Schrader

    Thanks, great widget! :-)

  23. 's gravatar 29th December 2008

    Ryan

    Excellent work; thank you!

  24. 's gravatar 4th January 2009

    Bill

    Just wondering, why does this dashboard widget try to connect to luddep.se?

  25. 's gravatar 4th January 2009

    Ludwig Pettersson

    Bill, it checks if a new version is available on launch.

  26. 's gravatar 4th January 2009

    Bill

    Thanks.

  27. 's gravatar 5th January 2009

    Sam Soffes

    Thank you very much! This makes monitoring my slices so easy. Love it!

  28. 's gravatar 9th January 2009

    Scott

    @Bill,

    It’s easy enough to look at widget source code (it’s javascript). Looks like update.js accesses luddep.se (via jQuery) to check for updates whenever the widget loads. Seems harmless - it doesn’t send any data.

  29. 's gravatar 19th January 2009

    Larry

    Works for me now! Thanks for the hard work!

  30. 's gravatar 21st January 2009

    Nunes

    Hi, Since I am colorblind do you think you could add a message live OK to the left image? Thanks a lot!

  31. 's gravatar 25th January 2009

    Aurelien

    Thanks so much, it’s very useful and it works great.

  32. 's gravatar 3rd February 2009

    Alex

    Mac OSX 10.5.6, latest version of widget (just removed and redownloaded now to check), API enabled at SliceHost…

    But the widget just won’t work. All I get is a “Timeout Error (recheck API key?)” message.

    Any ideas? :p I’d like to use this widget, but I am running out of ideas to check.

  33. 's gravatar 6th February 2009

    Luca

    i don’t know if you’ll ever support it, but under kde4 doesn’t work :( it shows up only for insert the api key, but nothing else (i can’t neither confirm that key)

  34. 's gravatar 12th February 2009

    Mike Davie

    Yeah, this is just seriously cool. Thank you for taking the time to build this and for sharing.

  35. 's gravatar 24th April 2009

    matt

    equally, any way to put on there % of HD used?… but in general VERY COOL.. and highly appreciated.. thx..

  36. 's gravatar 4th July 2009

    memiux

    Thanks, I think that adding a little more information would be useful

    <span class="bw"><label>Bandwidth:</label> ' + bw_iototal + 'GB ('+bw_in+' in / '+bw_out+' out) of ' + bw_available + 'GB</span>

    You should create a repository at github

  37. 's gravatar 7th July 2009

    Ludwig Pettersson

    I’m definitely open sourcing this in the near future & doing a quick polish on most things, stay tuned.

  38. 's gravatar 4th August 2009

    Jarrold

    thanks for this very sleek.

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