Montray: a tray icon and desktop alerts for systemd services and custom health checks

Montray is a lightweight tray-icon monitoring utility for systemd services and anything else you can check from the command line, on both local and remote machines.

I use Syncthing to sync important data across multiple machines. It works so well that, after setting it up, I just got used to it working all the time. And then one day I noticed that apparently some stuff didn't get synced. So I checked around, and found out that the Syncthing systemd service got broken a couple weeks ago for some reason, without me noticing it, and so nothing was synced during this time. Reconciling that data wasn't fun.

What's even more annoying is that an incident like a systemd service failure totally should have been communicated to me somehow, and yet I didn't know about it until I noticed side effects.

It wasn't the first time when I got frustrated about the OS being too silent about failures like that (both locally and on the servers), and so after this Syncthing incident, I finally resolved to fix it. I didn't want some enterprisey monitoring for this simple task: I just wanted a simple icon, always present in tray: green means it's all good, blinking yellow/red means something's broken. That's it.

So the first idea was to make it a sort of “systemd monitoring”. However, I soon realized that I actually want to reuse the same tray icon for monitoring other things; a trivial example is to just check if we're not running out of disk space. Most desktop environments do perform this check for us, but when it comes to the servers, we're on our own; and it happened to me more than once in the past that a server runs out of disk space and it takes a while to find that out and fix. So now Montray also supports running arbitrary command periodically, and alert on an unsuccessful exit code. This way, we can implement monitoring of literally anything that can be checked from the command line.

See more details on GitHub: https://github.com/dimonomid/montray