Strictly System Check

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Strictly System Check is a site monitoring tool that allows website administrators who may not have access to professional monitoring tools the ability to regularly check the status of their site and to be notified if the site goes down or becomes overloaded. I created this plugin initially for my own use as on one of my sites I regularly import content from XML feeds and I noticed that occasionally after a large update my site would suffer problems such as: * Error establishing a database connection, error appearing when I tried to access the site even though the configuration was correct. * All my articles and other content disappearing from the site. * A high server load that didn’t reduce quick enough after the import had finished I soon realised that this was down to one or more of the MyISAM database tables in the MySQL database becoming corrupted which meant that the tables were out of action, data couldn’t be retrieved and requests to the system were quickly building up. Running a REPAIR statement on the database always seemed to fix the problem. Therefore as I wasn’t always able to catch this problem when it occurred I thought I would automate a process that would check the homepage at regular intervals and on finding the database connection error it would then check the database for corrupt tables and automatically repair them. This was the primary reason for the plugin and I soon extended it to offer some more features such as The option to choose which URL is scanned when the system check is carried out The ability to search for a key phrase or piece of text in the source code and to raise a report if it’s not found The system also checks the server load and can raise a report if it’s over a specified limit The system also checks the database load to ensure that it’s not overloaded and not running too many queries The system is not suffering poor performance due to fragmented table indexes Reports on the number of connections, queries, reads, writes, aborted connections, slow queries The site administrator can specify their own threshold limits for the webserver and database loads and a report will be emailed out whenever these limits are reached or if the site is inaccessible. The report will return details of the response time it took to load the page, the current server load, the current database load and whether or not there were connection problems, issues with corrupt tables that needed repairing or fragmented indexes that were optimized. Whilst not a replacement for professional server monitoring tools it is a nice easy to use plugin that can help notify you when your site is down as well as rescuing your system from corrupt database tables before you even realise there has been an issue.