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Simple web based monitoring tools

I want to be able to check the status of my Banana Pi remotely, so I've tested three simple tools for viewing system information on-line. In order to use these tools, you need to install these packages:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-json 

Linux Dash

This tool is aimed at mobile users, with a flexible Javascript UI.  You can install Linux Dash from Github with this command:

git clone https://github.com/afaqurk/linux-dash.git

Copy Linux Dash to your web root directory:

sudo cp -r ./linux-dash /var/www

Now open a browser and go to http://<your Banana Pi's IP address>/linux-dash/. You should see something like this:

Linux Dash gives fairly comprehensive system information compare to the others, and the UI is configurable.

PhpSysInfo

You can clone PhpSysInfo from Github in your Pi's home directory with this command:

git clone https://github.com/phpsysinfo/phpsysinfo.git

Copy the sample config file to a new file without '.new' at the end of its name:

cp ./phpsysinfo-3.1.16/phpsysinfo.ini.new ./phpsysinfo-3.1.16/phpsysinfo.ini

Now copy the PhpSysInfo directory to the web server's root directory:

sudo cp -r ./phpsysinfo-3.1.16 /var/www

Now open a browser and go to http://<your Banana Pi's IP address>/phpsysinfo-3.1.16/.

PhpSysInfo has a simpler UI, but still provides useful information.

Linfo

Download Linfo from Sourceforge as a tar.gz file.  Extract Linfo into your home directory with this command:

tar xvf ./linfo-1.9.tar.gz

Make a copy of the sample config file without the 'sample.' in the name:

rename ~/linfo-1.9/sample.config.inc.php to ~/linfo-1.9/config.inc.php

Copy the Linfo directory to the server's web root directory:

sudo cp -r ~/linfo-1.9 /var/www

Open a web browser and go to http://<your Banana Pi's IP address>/linfo-1.9

Linfo has a fairly minimalist design with an emphasis on rapid page load times.

Restricting Access

You can restrict access to any of these tools with an .htaccess file, or by adding some code to Apache's virtual host file.  Open the file with this command:

sudo leafpad /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Add this code inside the virtual host to restrict access to the linfo-1.9 directory in /var/www/linfo-1.9:

<Location /linfo-1.9>
    Order allow,deny
    allow from 192.168.0
</Location>

Change 192.168.0 to match your local network.  You can use a specific IP address if you only want these statistics to be available from one host.  Finally, restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is a service that pings a web site periodically and measures response times.  It's a good idea to use this tool as well as one of the tools above.  There may be times when your server is running, but inaccessible from the internet.  This could happen if a router or modem crashes. In this case Uptimerobot will notify you by email if your server can't be reached.

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