Basic witness tasks' health check - python script

Today I got notified by @pfunk and @clayop (thanks!) that my pricefeed had not been updated in a while. This was the second time in a short period that the pricefeed update script had crashed and it had slipped my mind. Not good.

Learning more Python I wanted to give it a shot to create a basic monitor script which notifies me whenever I had not updated my pricefeed in a while (configurable - and therefore most probably there must be some error).

Additionally as @gtg recently also noticed, quite some public seednodes had been down and it seemed some witnesses had not noticed that, so I also added basic seednode timeout check too, by utilising Telnet lib inside python.

By using the Telegram API the basic monitor script notifies whenever:

1. Your pricefeed has not been updated in a X period of hours
2. Your public seednode is unresponsive / timeout or another error

Usage of the script requires a Bot on Telegram (read here) and @xeroc's piston-steem library for python.

Setup is pretty straightforward:

1. Copy witnesshealthcheck.py over to a server with interwebs and Piston.steem
2. Fill out the telegram_token and telegram_id variables as well as your witness and seed_node info.
3. chmod +x witnesshealthcheck.py
4. Test the script for example with a very low value for pricefeed_updatetreshold (it should notify immediately if you put it to 0)
5. Put the script inside a regular called (e.g. every 2/4 hours) cronjob.

Checkout the 'Witness Health Check' script on Github »

^{* image source: http://medicalfuturist.com}

• Open for pull requests!
• Any additional vital signs this witness script should check for? Leave your comments!