This is my first google gadget I have created a simple gadget which simply polls a URL every 5mins and displays the result.

It is designed to work with a server side script that will return a small text string that will be useful to display. You can actually set up a number of URLs to monitor.

Download a copy here: ServerMonitor2

For my purposes it displays, the hostname and server load of 2 applications, these applications are in a server cluster, so the hostname tells me which node the application is running on, and the system load is a good indicator of usage.

Server Side Code

The server side code can be as simple as this:
< ? php
$host = trim(`hostname`);
$fiveMinAvg = trim(`uptime | cut -f 5 -d ,`);
echo $host . ' (' . $fiveMinAvg .')';
?>

Let me know if you like it!

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