Nagios, Perl, and Mechanize.

We had to start monitoring many of the servers on our network since we could not rely on our vendor to monitor servers other than with "ping". One nice tool that really helps is Nagios. Nagios has some built in plugins to do some basic monitoring, however, what I needed was application monitoring. Nagios allows you to write plugins in any language and have them return a status indicating the state of the monitoring. Perl + Mechanize ended up being great to monitor web pages since Mechanize has lots of features to pull web pages and can even do authentication.

I wasn't much of a Perl fan since I found Perl's syntax to be cryptic and much of the Perl I have encountered on the internet seemed to be designed poorly or for job security. What I did discover was that you could write nice, neat Perl and that it could be great for doing all kinds of things quickly - or at least quicker than you can write it in other languages. Perl is less cryptic now, but it's taken a while to get over many of the quirks of the language. I still feel I have a long way to go before I can write Perl code without using Google. One day I should put some examples up on how to use Perl and Mechanize since the few I found were valuable.