UPDATE: 14th January 2008.

New Version : 2.0.4.1  Download:  ServerMonitor2

• Font type and size is now configurable.

UPDATE: 19th August 2007.

I have released a new version Server Monitor, v2.0.1.0.

New in this version:

• Configurable url refresh time
• Customisable colours , background, labels and URL result
• Auto update notification.

If your looking for colour inspiration, check out http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/. This is one of my favourite colour pickers.

This is my first Google gadget I have created a simple gadget which simply polls a URL every 5mins( 5 minutes is the default, you can change this globally and for each different URL you are monitoring.) 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!

Development TODO List:

• Configurable look: Labels and text colour, background colour and transparency.
• Text Filtering on retrieved URL
• Parse a JSON object, cycle through values
• Option to display only one server/URL at a time, cycle display if more than one exist
• configurable URL refresh time
• Auto Update notification