I relatively recently signed up with a new ISP and I have about 2 weeks to determine if their uptime is sufficient for running a server. My initial plan was to install Nagios on an old laptop and store it at a friend's house, but - long story short - a server at a friend's house is not feasible.
I have a two-fold goal:
- In the short term, I need something to determine if the new Internet connection is stable enough to run a server on. It doesn't need to alert me every time the Internet goes down, but it does need to have some kind of log I can look at to see if there was any downtime.
- In the longer term, I would like something that would alert me as soon as it has a problem reaching the server.
Ideally, I could accomplish both goals with the same piece of software.
I have an irrational aversion to SaaS, so I was thinking since I have an always-on, always-connected Linux box in my pocket (in the form of an Android phone), surely there's some existing tool for it to monitor the server's uptime.
When I scoured the Internet for such an app, it was a descent into madness. Many "monitoring" apps only check the server when you open up the app and tell it to ping. I want to set it up once, and then have the phone run checks every 1-5 minutes without any further action on my part. I don't mind it saturating my phone's data connection since I'm only really going to be wailing on it for the next 2 weeks. After that I can reduce the polling frequency.
Because I haven't found any such app, I'm thinking I can accomplish the first goal with a cron job on the server that would ping Google or something and write a log. This seems like the simplest option for right now, but it doesn't address the longer-term goal for monitoring.
Potentially relevant information: My budget is $0. All my devices are Linux or Android.
I'm hoping the brilliant people of Server Fault will have some insight/recommendation on how to best accomplish this goal. Thanks.