Robots for applications?

[EricWebb]

Is anyone using any sort of robot that runs a command-line program or opens a telnet session, simulates user input, and reads screen responses to determine if an application is running? I've seen (and understand) techniques using wget for web-driven apps, but this one is a command-line app that users telnet into.

[Markus]

You could run a script* that telnets into a site every few minutes and stores the outcome (success/failure) somewhere. Another Zabbix controlled script could then pick up this data asynchronously.

In fact I am currently working (draft stage) on such a mechanism for various protocols.

Markus

* in Expect or Python/telnetlib or maybe Perl

[elkor]

yeah I was going to suggest trying Expect.

it's relatively quick and simple to deal with, especially if you don't have a particuarly complicated application. And, it can be nested in shell scripts pretty easily.

[stritec]

I would use expect.

We have a DSL Connection to the outside world, and we have zabbix monitor that we can get to www.yahoo.com. If the ping cannot get out, then we assume there's a problem with our DSL Connection.

I have a very simple Expect script which logs into the router via telnet, then issues the system command, and selects restart, and the router restarts.

Very simple, and easy because of expect.

[desertrate77]

Still sounds like a very useful idea. Has anyone tried it so far? One idea might be to combine the python idea and the Expect idea, with something like Pexpect (http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/). Power of python, flexibility of Expect.