Check websites for health and mixed-content
by bear
Often in Ops you need to monitor your websites to make sure they are active and responding. Many tools exist to do this and you can find 3rd party services to do the checking. I needed to check sites that often don’t work with 3rd party services because they are inside of firewalls.
To solve this problem I created a tool named Kenkou (which is Romaji for 健康 health) to walk thru a list of sites, make GET requests and see if they respond properly and if they don’t, to include the error result in the alert message. Currently it supports PagerDuty and PostageApp for alerts but I’m working on Redis and whatever else I can think of.
When you are dealing with a site that is active and updated on a regular basis you often get changes that cause mixed-content warnings to appear and most of the devs and designers won’t notice for many small reasons. To help solve this I have added to Kenkou the ability to scan the website’s content for any mixed-content references and generate an event with the URLs in question.
This tool is running every 15 minutes for us via a cronjob and it is keeping track of our ever growing list of websites, static asset sites and other HTTP delivered content. I hope others may find it useful also.