Tuesday 20 July 2010

Strictly System Check Wordpress Plugin

A Site and Server Monitoring Plugin for Wordpress

I have just created a new Wordpress plugin, Strictly System Check, which allows me to easily monitor my Wordpress sites for signs of performance problems such as an overloaded server, too many database connections, corrupt tables or website issues.

I created this plugin primarily for my own use as I noticed that I quite regularly would experience my site going down with the "Error establishing a database connection" error after bulk imports of content after using WP-O-Matic. Whether it was this plugin or another one that caused the problem I don't know but the actual underlying issue is not a misconfigured database but corrupt database tables primarily the wp_options or wp_posts tables.

Therefore the main idea behind the plugin was for it to check my site at scheduled intervals and if it came across this database error message to then scan my MySQL database tables for corrupt tables and if any were found to automatically run a REPAIR statement.

I then extended this functionality to incorporate some more tests including a scan of the HTML source for a known string to ensure that my site is running correctly as well as checks against the webserver to guage the current load average and current database connection count.

The plugin allows webmasters to set their own preferred thresholds so that if the load average was say 2.0 or above then a report would be emailed out to a specified email address informing them of the situation.

Whilst this plugin is not meant to be a replacement for all the great professional site monitoring tools that are available it's a nice add-on that allows website administrators who may not have access to such tools to regularly check the status of their site and to be notified if the site goes down or becomes overloaded.

Please let me know what you think of the plugin and if you like it or it saves your site from going down then please make a donation.